Jennifer Valdivia Espino joined the Simons Foundation in 2022. She previously served as the assistant director for the Graduate Program in Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. As the student and fellow program manager for the Autism and Neuroscience division, Valdivia Espino facilitates programs that seek to broaden the scientific community and open pathways to careers in science, including the Fellows-to-Faculty Award and the Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience. These programs provide funding, career development and mentorship for trainees engaged in basic science research in autism, systems and computational neuroscience, and healthy cognitive aging, among other areas.

Valdivia Espino earned her bachelor’s degree at the Pennsylvania State University and her M.S. in population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She is a trained facilitator of the Entering Mentoring and Entering Research curricula from the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER), completed the fundamentals course from the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE), and participates in the national conference subcommittee for the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). She is an alumna of Penn State’s McNair Scholars Program and the UW-Madison SciMed Graduate Research Scholars Program.