Rebeca Campos-Sanchez has been a professor of Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics at the University of Costa Rica (UCR) since 2005. Her PhD studies took her to Pennsylvania State University where she worked on genomics and bioinformatics, graduating in 2015. With the plan to continue working on genomics on return to Costa Rica, to her surprise bioinformatics was still exclusive to a small group of researchers with previous experience in the field or with strong international collaborators. Her goal since then has been to enlarge the community and consolidate this field by the creation of RedBioAplicada and supporting the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Masters program.