Sierra earned her B.S. in Neuroscience with a minor in Bioinformatics from UCLA in 2018. As an undergraduate, she studied fungal growth and network dynamics. After graduation, she spent the next two years as a lab technician at Johns Hopkins researching axon regeneration. She is currently a 1st year Neuroscience PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation in the retina.