Harold SaavedraDr. Harold I. Saavedra obtained a bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, where he performed research under the supervision of Dr. Magda Morales. He then obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge National Lab Graduate School in Biomedical Sciences with a focus in genetics and molecular biology of cancer under the supervision of Dr. Wen K. Yang. He became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cincinnati under the supervision of Dr. Peter J. Stambrook, where he studied how oncogenes drive chromosome instability to initiate cancers This was followed by a second postdoctoral fellowship at Dr. Gustavo W. Leone at the Ohio State University, where he used mouse model of cancers to study the contribution of dysregulated cell and centrosome cycles to tumorigenesis. Dr. Saavedra was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Radiation Oncology at Emory University, where he studied the sources and consequences of centrosome amplification and chromosome instability in breast cancers with prestigious KO1 and R01 National Cancer Institute grants, and as a Georgia Cancer Coalition Scholar. He was recruited as Associate Professor by the Ponce Health Sciences University (PHSU) in 2015 to study breast cancer health care disparities in Puerto Rican women. He has received multiple awards at PHSU, including the U54 PHSU/Moffitt Cancer Center Partnership’s Full project, and the Puerto Rico Science Trust’s Small Grant and the Advanced grant. He is currently in the U54 PHSU/MCC Administration Core and is co-leader of the Professional Development Core of the NIH Hispanic Alliance grant. His goal is to diminish health care disparities between Puerto Rican women and other ethnic groups and to train the new generation of Puerto Rican biomedical scientists.