Most attorneys don't arrive at the law with a research background. Paola Vargas did — nearly a decade of it — and it still shapes how she builds an argument today.
Before law school, Paola spent years directing research programs, much of it focused on lupus, a disease that disproportionately and more severely affects women of color. Her work contributed to peer-reviewed publications and is documented in the Lupus Foundation of America's publications archive, where she appears as first or second author — a prominent position — on much of the collective data-analysis work cited there.
Data as a Form of Advocacy
Research doesn't feel like advocacy in the moment. It feels like spreadsheets, methodology sections, and endless revisions. But Paola's research consistently returned to a single question: who is being underdiagnosed, underserved, or overlooked, and why? Lupus disproportionately affects Black and Latina women, and much of her published work centered on closing the diagnostic and treatment gaps those populations face.
That question — who is falling through the cracks, and what specific mechanism is causing it — turned out to be excellent training for legal work. Litigation and advocacy both reward the same instinct: find the precise point where a system fails a person, and build your case around fixing that exact point rather than the symptom.
Translating Between Two Systems
Years spent explaining clinical findings to patients, caregivers, and advocacy organizations gave Paola a skill that doesn't show up in most legal training: the ability to translate expert material into something a non-expert can act on. That turns out to matter constantly in legal advocacy, where clients are frequently handed dense, consequential paperwork with no one available to explain what it actually means for their lives.
It's part of why her approach to legal work looks less like a courtroom drama and more like a research project with a client attached: gather the facts, understand the system the client is up against, and explain each step clearly enough that the client is never navigating it alone. It's the same instinct that shaped how she approached being a first-generation student in an unfamiliar academic system.
Why the Throughline Matters
It would be easy to describe Paola's career as two unrelated chapters: research, then law. She doesn't see it that way. Both are, at their core, about building an evidence-based case for why a system needs to change — one through publication, the other through practice. You can see more of that throughline reflected on her professional site.
She's also candid that the research years weren't a detour on the way to a legal career — they were the preparation for it, whether or not she recognized that at the time. Read more about her full background.
Conclusion
For Paola Vargas, public health research and legal advocacy were never two separate careers stitched together. They're the same project, approached from two different angles: understand exactly who a system is failing, and build the most rigorous possible case for fixing it.