Dagmar García Rivera—a career of passion and resilience

Dagmar García-Rivera is a pharmacist and the Vice Director of Research and Development at the Finlay Vaccine Institute in Havana, Cuba. Being from a family of university professors, it was not difficult for her to choose a career focusing on research: “I [grew up] in a house where we heard … about knowledge, university studies, doctoral degrees … I [understood] since I was very young that I [needed] to study [to do] something important”, she says. Her role models, her father and a school chemistry teacher, influenced her to become a researcher, as she states: “This professor was very important to despertar [spark] the interest for science … my father [and others] … allowed me to see [that] with the Pharmacy career I could find the relation that I wanted between chemistry and [biology]”.