MD/PhD Student Bianca Leonard Honored for Excellence in Health for the Latino Community

At UC Irvine’s ninth annual Latine Excellence and Achievement Award Dinner (LEAD), Bianca Leonard, PhD, was honored for graduate student excellence in health at the intersection of neuroscience and mental health.

“Qué onda?”

That’s how Bianca Leonard, a Honduran-American MD/PhD student in UC Irvine’s Medical Scientist Training Program, greets her cousins when she sees them. It’s Spanish for “what’s up?” or “what’s the vibe?”

“I’m from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but my family is international,” says Leonard, explaining that her mom immigrated to the U.S. from Honduras in her 20s. “My parents spend most of their time in Honduras now, so I’m across cultures and countries.”

This multicultural upbringing has influenced Leonard’s approach to research at the intersection of neuroscience and mental health. It also led her to join the Program in Medical Education for the Latino Community (PRIME-LC), which trains physicians to meet the needs of under-resourced Latino communities.

“PRIME-LC has helped me connect my cultural background to the biomedical and clinical spaces where I work,” she says. Her efforts to better address mental health needs and to mentor students from marginalized communities earned her recognition on April 16, 2026, at the ninth annual Latine Excellence and Achievement Award Dinner (LEAD).

“It feels good to uplift the community and to be recognized for that work,” says Leonard of receiving the award for Graduate Student Excellence in Health for the Latino Community.

Neuroscience and Mental Health

“Why am I the way that I am? Why are other people the way that they are?” These are the types of questions Leonard started asking at an early age. “I suffer from chronic migraines,” she says, “and that made me interested in the brain and why my brain reacts in such sensitive ways to certain inputs.”

Leonard took her first class in neuroscience as an undergraduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, and she’s been hooked ever since. “Neuroscience has really helped me make sense of the world,” she says, “but my life experiences drove me toward mental health.”

Leonard lost her younger brother three years ago after a 10-year battle with his mental health. “I interfaced with the mental health services that he was working through quite a lot, and that experience shaped me long before I even started my PhD,” she says. It motivated Leonard to not only come to the UC Irvine School of Medicine but also the Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences, where, in April 2026, she earned her PhD in neurobiology and behavior, working in the lab of Michael A. Yassa, PhD. (She remains an MSTP student as she works to complete her MD.)

“I felt that I needed to learn more and understand more,” she says, grateful for Yassa’s mentorship as she completed her dissertation on anhedonia, a mental health symptom characterized by an inability to experience joy. “Anhedonia is associated with many different mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia,” she says, “so having a better understanding of it could help a lot of different people.”

Leonard has been studying how early-life development can shape the way that reward circuits communicate and how that, in turn, can later develop into anhedonia. “My research explores how having more unpredictability in that early-life environment can create this anhedonia phenotype in some people and what kind of therapies can address that reward difference,” she says. “Anhedonia also has a strong relationship to treatment resistance, substance use disorder, and suicide and suicidal ideation, so hopefully we can piece it all together.”

Clinical Care and Building Community

After completing her thesis, Leonard is now returning to medical school. “I’m starting my third year of medical school next week, where I’m actually in the hospital seeing patients,” she says, “so I’m very excited to apply what I’ve been studying for my PhD to the real world.”

She also emphasizes the role of communication. “So much of my journey has been marked by shame, stigma and misunderstanding, and it’s part of many different cultures, including my own,” she says. She views science communication and mental health education as an important part of the solution.

Toward that goal, she has started a YouTube channel and Instagram account called “Qué Onda?”

“I’m sharing information in English, but the ‘Qué Onda?’ title is a call to my culture,” she says. “I want this to be a hopeful space on the Internet, where people feel seen and can share positive messages related to mental health.”

She says she has felt a strong sense of community here in California. “It has helped me understand more deeply the issues my family has faced, and seeing it in others, I realized this wasn’t only happening to us,” she says. “So I want to be talking about mental health and issues that affect the Latino community.”

— Shani Murray