‘You have to believe that you can be a leader’: Sophia Lugo, NHI’s 2024 Person of the Year

Sophia Lugo has made a remarkable journey in her career so far, moving from Silva Magnet/Jefferson High School in El Paso to Harvard University for undergraduate studies on biology, the Schwarzman Scholars program at Tsinghua University for graduate studies in public policy, and Stanford University for her MBA, work with entities including the Boston Consulting Group and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, eventually becoming co-founder and CEO of a company aiming to change medicine as we know it. 

But in the midst of all that, she found inspiration in what the National Hispanic Institute provided her. 

“It was extremely significant to me,” said Lugo, who NHI has named its last Person of the Year in its annual New Year’s Eve tradition. “It’s the most significant thing I did in my high school career.” 

Lugo first participated in NHI as part of El Paso’s Texas Great Debate team in 2010, before going on the National LDZ the next year as well as volunteering to help deliver NHI programs to other students. That included serving as president of El Paso NHI Great Debate and Assistant Secretary of State at the National LDZ. 

“You have to believe that you can be a leader. If you don’t see people who look like leaders around you … the first time I saw people who had my same culture being leaders was in NHI. That’s step one, just believing that you can lead.” 

She says that NHI helped her develop confidence and a sense of community she carries to this day. 

“I loved school, but I was very shy,” she recalls of the high school-version of herself. “So firstly, NHI taught me skills of presenting myself, argumentation. It gave me a very tight knit community that I’m still friends with to this day.” 

But it also gave her a sense of belief in her ability to lead — seeing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez carve out her cavalier and people-centered pathway to Congress, hearing NHI founder Ernesto Nieto tell her she was destined to do big things, and being immersed in El Paso’s NHI community. 

“it gave me skills in argumentation, skills in understanding, even my own rationale for why I may value some things over others,” she recalled. “It gave me public speaking skills, general leadership skills, how to organize and influence people to head in a certain direction, and then the impacts of doing it in different ways, like exerting power, pulling people along versus pushing them.”

Ernesto Nieto observed, “Sophia Lugo, and all her siblings, participated in NHI from 9th grade and on into her undergraduate and professional years. Sophia has contributed her time and treasure to NHI. Her mother was the Parent Chair and eventually Project Administrator of NHI at El Paso. There is no doubt about the commitment to excellence and community that Sophia and her family have.”

Lugo’s since become a leader in biotechnology — a field in which she says Latinos are still significantly underrepresented. She first worked for several different companies before founding Radar Therapeutics in 2022.

‘You have to do it yourself’

“I knew I wanted to do my own company,” Lugo said, harkening back to an idea that’s stayed with her from her NHI days. “No one out there is going to create the world that you want to see. You have to do it yourself. If I want a world that’s more equitable for people who are like me, then I need to work on creating it. I cannot just wait around to see if other people, other communities outside of mine, are going to do it.” 

While the smart and programmable medicines her company is developing seem straight out of science fiction, Lugo sees them as a route to creating more affordable and scalable treatments for cancer and other diseases, compared to what exists in the United States’ current health care system. 

According to its website, Radar Therapeutics specializes in precision-expressed mRNA-based therapeutics, enabling “targeted, timely and controlled reading of the mRNA message in just the right cells, avoiding toxic side effects in non-targeted cells.” 

“What the technology is able to do is to find and isolate cells within the body instead of having to remove them from the body,” Lugo explained, adding that her company is particularly invested in helping underserved populations. 

While she considers genetic medicines to be “one of the greatest medical innovations of our time,” she’s still concerned about what’s involved in current iterations of these drugs – believing that Radar’s approach can improve upon this. 

Noting that current genetic medicines can require supplementary chemotherapy treatments, lengthy hospitalizations in intensive care units, with treatments ranging to as much as $1-5 million per patient, she remarks, “We envision a future where genetic medicines are more affordable and more accessible.”

Applying NHI values to health care 

In a Dorm Room Fund article from March 2022, prior to her meeting her Radar co-founder and setting out on her current direction, she shared views on where patients should more holistically fit into the health care equation than they currently do. 

“If you look at it from a market perspective, there’s a huge market and a high incidence of chronic disease in the Hispanic population,” she said. “A lot of those are lifestyle changes – what technology can attack. You can redesign the patient system to be oriented towards the patient in his entirety, including his social and cultural background. 

“How do we redesign the system to include the patient and the entirety of experiences and include the minority patient, including Hispanic patients, in that reconfiguration of the patient design workflow?”

That perspective caught the attention of Julio Cotto, NHI’s senior vice president, who considered that to exemplify NHI ideals in a real-world situation. 

“The including of the patient into the design is very similar to NHI thinking that puts the community in charge of its own solutions and possibilities, not just a recipient of support and services,” Cotto said of this view toward patients having more of a participatory role in their health care.

“One of the things NHI wants to do is ensure that our NHI-trained leaders design the future, including studying its needs and aspirations, and make these elements part of their projects in the modern era,” said Nicole Nieto, NHI’s executive vice president. “This is what Sophia has delivered to her community.”

“Sophia has been a head coach, a tournament staffer, CWS Mentor, and facilitator at Celebracion,” Cotto added. “She stays in touch often with NHI leaders and her native El Paso and has pushed to create opportunities for leadership mentorship between younger college graduate NHIers and more seasoned professional alumni. 

“This new venture in her professional career shows a lot of the tenacity, courage, and high intellectual prowess that she demonstrated within NHI spaces all her life.”