Samantha Carrera is originally from Mexico and completed her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Leicester in the UK where she studied the effect of the microenvironment on the response to apoptosis. After graduating, she worked as a postdoctoral scientist at Bristol University researching transcription factor regulation. For her second postdoc, she moved to Manchester University to study gene regulation. In 2020, she started work as an experimental officer in the cell engineering branch of the Genome Editing Unit Core Facility at the University of Manchester where she utilises CRISPR and other technologies to create cell lines for research groups across the university.