Cristina was born and raised in Puerto Rico, where she earned her undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Puerto Rico – Aguadilla. As an undergraduate, she explored and implemented genetic engineering tools such as CRISPR. As a PhD student in MIT’s Biological Engineering Department, working in the Synthetic Neurobiology group, she invented new methods for imaging potassium in living cells, and explored methods of barcoding the zebrafish brain for high throughput connectivity mapping.