A bit more about me.

I’m Elijah, a student, musician, and person who has always lived in the space between worlds. I grew up translating for my family: medical updates, legal notices, school emails, anything that arrived in English but needed to be lived in Spanish. Those moments became the root of how I think about knowledge: if information can’t cross a barrier, linguistic, educational, or emotional, then it may as well not exist. That belief still shapes everything I do.

Curiosity is my default setting. I’m the kid who once pulled apart a fallen strand of beard moss just to figure out why a plant might need a tendon, freezing mid-trail with a damp white filament stretched between my fingers and a dozen new questions unfurling in my head That same instinct shows up now in research, in music, and in photography. I think paying attention to people, to ecosystems, to patterns, is my love language.

In my research, I follow the questions that tug at me, even when they look “meaningless” to everyone else, like why a yoga study might downregulate a receptor involved in chronic stress and cancer. Chasing those rabbit holes transformed my understanding of what it means to do science: not to be the smartest person in the room, but the one willing to stay with a hard question until it becomes clear enough for someone else to use

Music and the arts shape the other half of my education. Whether I’m at a piano, in a rehearsal room, or taking photos from the sidelines of a lacrosse field, I’m always looking for the small human moments, the tired defender leaning on his long pole, the soft rustle of choir folders, the breath before a downbeat. Art, like science, is translation: turning attention into something that can be felt.

This website is a small snapshot of all of that: the questions I’m asking, the work I’m building, the people and places that raised me, and the worlds I’m trying to live in with a little more care.