Michael Estrella

If you ask Michael Estrella where he’s from, he’d probably say New York—and fail to mention he’s from a low-income, immigrant, single-parent household. “I am a researcher, hoping that my work will help protect the health of communities,” he says. “Yet, growing up, I was on the receiving end, part of a community that needed help.” Estrella spent his childhood in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, a place once steeped in poverty and crime. By the time he was 7, his parents had divorced and his father returned to the Dominican Republic. Estrella spent most of his time with his mother, working in the local bodega, a small corner grocery store. During Estrella’s first year at a local college, his mother underwent hip replacement surgery; seeing her arduous recovery convinced him that getting a degree could change not only his life but also the lives of others. He turned his attention to science, eventually focusing on biomedicine. Now studying a process by which bacteria rid themselves of foreign genetic material, Estrella wants to figure out how to control the mechanism at work in hopes of stemming antibiotic resistance. It’s an investigation that he’d like to continue in his own lab someday, with his own cadre of students. “If I can train other scientists,” he says, “that’s the best possible way I can give back.”