there was a picture of a kid , with really straight hair , whose hair was standing on end after being rubbed with a balloon . i was born and raised in the archipelago of puerto rico . in the tropics , where there is 80% humidity year - round , you do not need to rub a balloon for your hair to stick straight up . daniel a. coln - ramos most of the scientific examples i learned in school were similarly irrelevant to my reality growing up in puerto rico . for seed dispersal , i learned about the helicopter - shaped maple tree seeds , something i had never seen , because maple trees do not grow in the caribbean . but when only examples from elsewhere are used , one learns that science is a distant , irrelevant thing done elsewhere . outside the classroom , i was stimulated by  the richness of the biological diversity around me , and my mind was constantly churning out questions . if plants ca nt feel , then why does the moriviv ( mimosa pudica ) close when touched ? how does a tinglar hatchling ( leatherback turtle , dermochelys coriacea ) , know to go to the ocean when it comes out of its egg ? how does it remember , many years later , to come back to the same beach on which it was born to lay its eggs ? regardless of where we are born on planet earth , we wonder and marvel about the world around us . while the knowledge produced by science is of universal importance , not everyone has equal access to scientific networks that produce knowledge . how we communicate and make scientific discoveries relevant to others a strategy known in education as  contextualizationcontributes , by design or by accident , to who sees themselves as belonging in science . instead , i became that annoying kid who is constantly interrupting and asking questions , many of them largely irrelevant to what is being taught in class . by the time i graduated from elementary school , i had earned the nickname  el estudiante de las mil preguntas  ( the student with one thousand questions ) . i was fortunate that my parents and many of my teachers in mater salvatoris elementary school and , later , in colegio san ignacio high school had the patience and the disposition to answer my endless barrage of questions . asking questions , even questions that might seem stupid , is a critically important skill , particularly for a scientist . but in scientific research , as in any form of learning , what one knows is a starting point toward the unknown . a question is the first step in a journey seeking to connect our brains to a broader network of knowledge . , knowledge serves as a platform on which one stands and , through questioning , stares at and recognizes the dark boundaries where our collective human knowledge ends . those boundaries are the special places where scientific discoveries become most impactful , extending new paths toward the unknown . but to find those boundaries that havent been mapped , one can not be afraid to ask questions and stare at the precipice of one s own ignorance . for example , after learning that plantain sap , considered largely useless in puerto rico , was used in the dominican republic for treating tuberculosis , i developed a project that demonstrated the antimicrobial properties of the plantain sap . the project , rooted in my experience and surroundings , felt relevant and helped me see science as a tool of discovery and learning . i majored in biology , attended scholarly lectures by world - class scientists , and received well - meaning mentorship . yet , in college , science again felt foreign and distant , and i struggled to connect . in the enormous lecture halls where the basic science courses were taught , i found little space for what i enjoyed most in science : asking questions . my questions became casualties to the fast - paced , meat - grinder courses structured as filters for pre - med students . i joined a lab to gain research experience but felt lost in the concepts and intimidated by the environment . by the end of my sophomore year , i had performed mediocrely in my science courses , gotten fired from my job as a lab tech , and started seriously wondering whether science was really for me . the search for my place in science was an intellectual journey that eventually took me thousands of miles away from cambridge , into the jungles of central america . working in collaboration with the smithsonian tropical research institute , i traveled in dugout canoes to remote tawahka villages in honduras and ember communities in panam . i lived among indigenous groups and documented their use of medicinal plants and the rain forest . these experiences allowed me once again the flexibility to develop and ask my own questions . in the remote villages , i met many individuals without formal scientific training who were asking critical questions about the world around them . these were important experiences that greatly influenced my development as a scientist and as a person , and they resulted in my first publication ( godoy et al . , , far away from any lab , in villages that lay completely off the grid and went entirely dark after sunset , i started to clearly see my path toward becoming a scientist . in the rain forests of central america , i had the flexibility to formulate my own questions but lacked the training to push them forward . science is an apprenticeship , and i needed a mentor to teach me how to transition from being a consumer of knowledge to being a producer of knowledge . i also needed a role model . at a time of much self - doubt , i needed to see that people like me could contribute to science . so i reached out to the only puerto rican scientist i knew , mariano garca - blanco . as a postbaccalaureate student in his lab at duke university i established a collaboration with robert singer s lab at albert einstein college of medicine and developed a protocol for fluorescent in situ hybridization in the alga chlamydomonas reinhardtii ( uniacke et al . , 2011 ) . i discovered changes in the nuclear architecture of c. reinhardtii corresponding to transcriptional changes occurring during flagellar regeneration ( coln - ramos et al . i also discovered my interest in cell biology and decided to go to graduate school . i joined the university program in genetics at duke university and the lab of sally kornbluth . in sally s lab , i worked on the molecular mechanisms of programmed cell death and identified a viral family of proteins similar to drosophila reaper that induce apoptosis ( holley et al . , 2002 ; coln - ramos et al . , 2003a ; olson et al . , 2003 ) . i also made the surprising discovery that the proapoptotic protein reaper and the viral proteins i identified regulate translation by directly binding to ribosomes and modulating ribosomal subunit assembly ( coln - ramos et al . to answer these questions , i had to leave the comfort zone of the techniques i used regularly and set up collaborations that allowed me to establish in vitro systems to study ribosomal profiles and protein synthesis . a critical skill i learned during this period was how to seek and establish meaningful collaborations that open up new areas of discovery . by the end of my phd i became interested in how the complex but organized architecture of neural circuits emerges during development to regulate behavior . neuroscience had never been part of my formal training , but science is less about what you know and more about what you are willing to learn . i reached out to the network of mentors and peers i built during graduate school and used them as sounding boards to refine my interests , identify potential postdoctoral mentors , and learn about the outstanding questions in the neuroscience field . i then systematically approached ( some would say pestered ) labs working in model organisms and using approaches that linked cell biology and genetics with circuit connectivity and behavior . in breezy summer nights in the archipelago of puerto rico , leatherback turtle hatchlings can be seen racing across the moonlit beaches of the island of culebra toward the surf . these turtles are born with an ancestral memory : they instinctively know to go toward the ocean . this behavior is wired into the leatherback turtle s nervous system and was selected for by evolution . once born , the hatchling forms a new memory , one that it will carry throughout its lifetime . it will remember the beach on which it was born , and many years later , after traveling the world s oceans , it will return to that same beach to nest . these were questions that i asked myself as a child , and they are directly related to the fundamental questions in neuroscience that my lab examines today . i joined kang shen s lab at stanford university to establish a system in the nematode caenorhabditis elegans to study these questions . but that only means that the marvelous complexity of its organization is hidden from us by its extreme smallness .  c. elegans forms memories . for example , c. elegans does not have an innate preferred temperature and can instead remember the temperature at which it is cultivated ( hedgecock and russell , 1975 ) . the neurons that control this behavior and their connectivity are known ( white et  al . , 1986 ; mori and ohshima , 1995 ) , but how synapses are established and modified to form these memories is not . during my postdoc , i adapted markers that allowed me to inspect the cell biology of synapses during development . using these cellular markers , i discovered a role for glial cells in specifying synaptic connections in vivo through netrin signaling ( coln - ramos et al . , 2007 ) . now , in my own lab at yale ( figure 1 ) , we are interested in understanding how synapses are assembled and maintained to build the neuronal architecture underlying thermotactic behavior , and how they are modified to store memories . we established collaborations to develop and use new instrumentation and approaches for better visualization of the events leading to correct synaptogenesis ( rankin et  al . , 2011 ; wu et al . , 2011 , 2013a , b ; kumar et al . , 2014 ; christensen et al . , 2015 ; santella et al . , we also collaborate to visualize neuronal activity and thermotactic behavior in c. elegans ( ha et al . , 2010 ; we identified conserved mechanisms of neurodevelopment and synaptic assembly ( christensen et al . , 2011 ; smith et al . , 2012 ; stavoe and coln - ramos , 2012 ; stavoe et al . , 2012 ; nelson and coln - ramos , 2013 ; zhang et al . , 2014 ) and unexpected roles for glia in establishing and maintaining synaptic positions ( shao et al . , we also discovered a role for autophagy in synapse formation ( stavoe et al . , 2016 ) and documented a metabolic subcompartment that powers synaptic function and animal behavior ( jang et al . all of our projects started by asking simple , fundamental questions , understanding how to break them down into solvable experimental problems and pioneering new approaches , by forging collaborations , that provide tractable ways of addressing our questions . my journey into science has been one of searching for connections . now , as part of the scientific network , i see connections everywhere . scientific knowledge results from a robust network of influences and cross - pollination of ideas . scientists influence one another through their publications , research talks , collaborations , and , of course , through teaching , training , and mentoring . how these networks of knowledge are wired influences who is connected to the world of science . when i trained with scientists like mariano garca - blanco , sally kornbluth , and kang shen , i synapsed onto this larger network of knowledge , one that extends back through time and links me to a global community of scientists . these networks were key in my education and training as a scientist and in my ability to do science today . the scientific community produces knowledge with the aspiration that it will be consequential and influence the way that we understand the world around us . for science to fulfill this aspiration , the ideas and knowledge produced by scientists need to be accessible . yet our networks are not necessarily representative of our aspirations , as they remain inaccessible to most . they are instead representative of the history of science , one that until recently , exclusively served a very narrow demographic . it is a history that affected e. e. just as an african - american scientist ( manning , 1983 ) . it is also a heavy - handed legacy that today influences who belongs in science , who benefits from the scientific enterprise , and who does not . these interests led me to found an organization called ciencia puerto rico ( cienciapr ; www.cienciapr.org ) . it is an online network of more than 7500 scientists , students , and educators who are geographically dispersed across 50 countries , but who are connected in their commitment to promoting scientific research and education in puerto rico ( guerrero - medina et al . , 2013 ) . wonderful things happen when you connect people s minds . by crowd - sourcing essays that contextualize science for kids growing up in the tropical caribbean , the cienciapr community was able to produce a book that communicates to children in puerto rico that science is relevant to them ( gonzlez - espada et al . , 2011 ) . the book discusses the discovery of giant fossilized sharks in the puerto rican karst country . it talks about how parts of the puerto rican archipelago were  born  in the pacific ocean and shifted to the caribbean basin through tectonic plate movements . it describes the resilient microbial communities that paint many colors in the salt flats of the puerto rican southwestern coast . when developed carefully and deliberately , networks have the potential of extending the impact of our knowledge and discoveries . in doing so , they also help scientists like me fulfill our responsibilities as points of contact between the production of knowledge and its dissemination , not to a privileged few , but to all . for further descriptions of my research interests in cell biology , please see coln - ramos ( 2013 ) . for a video description of the value of collaborations in our work , please see www.ibiology.org/ibiomagazine/issue-11/daniel-colon-ramos-networks-and-the-nervous-system.html . for a video description of the cienciapr network , please see www.ibiology.org/ibiomagazine/issue-10/daniel-colon-ramos-making-science-relevant.html .
my laboratory is interested in the cell biology of the synapse 
 . synapses , which are points of cellular communication between neurons , were first described by santiago ramn y cajal as 
 protoplasmic kisses that appear to constitute the final ecstasy of an epic love story . 
 who would not want to work on that ? 
 ! my lab examines the biological mechanisms neurons use to find and connect to each other . 
 how are synapses formed during development , maintained during growth , and modified during learning ? in this essay , i reflect about my scientific journey to the synapse , the cell biological one , but also a metaphorical synapse 
 my role as a point of contact between the production of knowledge and its dissemination . in particular , 
 i discuss how the architecture of scientific networks propels knowledge production but can also exclude certain groups in science .