Delivering the Perfect Combo With Boxing and Science
By: Jeff Joiner | September 8, 2025
Amanda Alvarez PhD’17 has several passions in her life, including the beaches of her native Puerto Rico and salsa dancing. She also loves conducting research, particularly within her specialty of neuroscience. And she loves boxing ― so much so that she opened a gym.
Alvarez is mixing the two most important things in her life ― science and boxing ― in an unusual combination that has come together in her East Dallas gym, LaBori Boxing, in a predominately Hispanic neighborhood.
“At first I started offering free salsa dance classes that allowed me to connect with the community,” Alvarez said. “And it clicked for me that my dream of opening a boxing gym would offer the East Dallas community something it needed, accessibility to this type of fitness, both physically and financially. That’s why I knew the gym needed to be a nonprofit with free classes for kids. And I knew boxing would be culturally relevant to the Hispanic community.”
Alvarez grew up in the small mountain town of San Germán, Puerto Rico, on an island where boxing is a major part of the sporting culture. She followed the sport, longing to be an amateur boxer, and began training at home as a teenager. When she moved to New York City to attend New York University, she found a coach and has spent many hours in the gym since.
“Boxing is a smart sport that engages your full body,” Alvarez said. “You have to be strategic, and your mind has to be engaged. It gives your brain a reset as you hit that boxing bag or spar with a coach, so the stress release is incredible.”
With graduation from NYU with a degree in neuroscience imminent, Alvarez began looking for PhD programs. She came across The University of Texas at Dallas, which is nationally recognized for its neuroscience program in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and started her doctoral studies there in 2012.
“I had such an amazing experience at UT Dallas,” she said. “I had amazing professors, and the courses were challenging, but my colleagues in the PhD program were so collaborative. Everybody was willing to work together.”
Alvarez joined the lab of Dr. Christa McIntyre and spent her entire time at the University in McIntyre’s lab. She also worked closely with Dr. Michael Kilgard, director of the Texas Biomedical Device Center at UTD. Much of Alvarez’s research involved vagus nerve stimulation, and she has been published numerous times in journals.
After graduating in 2017, Alvarez worked for several years at pharmaceutical companies and later as a research analysis and competitive intelligence consultant. During this period, her dream of opening a boxing gym for kids was realized.
“When I started it, it was crazy and overwhelming working full time and opening the gym, but the gym and the whole community we’ve built around it have been worth it,” she said. “I was getting to do both of my passions ― science and boxing.”
Alvarez opened her gym on East Grand Avenue in Dallas in 2022. Before the space was even finished, she offered an introductory boxing workshop to area families, and 11 kids showed up. Today, the gym’s half a dozen coaches have taught boxing skills to more than 400 girls and boys. The team is able to provide free boxing lessons to kids with funding from grants, donations and fees from adult exercise classes.
“The goal is to harness the positive effects of boxing and provide a safe place for students after school to grow their self-confidence, feel stronger, practice discipline and perseverance and regulate stress. All of this can help them be successful in life,” Alvarez said.
And now that the gym is established, she’s further combining her love of boxing and science by holding STEM-focused workshops at the gym for neighborhood families. She has worked with organizations from throughout the region who have sent scientists, doctors and engineers to LaBori Boxing to explain their professional paths into science, technology, engineering and math careers. Partners have included Dallas College, Raytheon and UT Southwestern Medical Center, which sent a group of medical students to talk about how they were able to attend medical school.
“Most of the workshops have been led by a Hispanic person who is somebody in a STEM industry that sounds and looks like our students,” she said. “This is my way of trying to close the gap in representation in the STEM workforce by exposing our students to different career paths.”
Alvarez not only wants to show students STEM careers, but she also hopes to take advantage of her growing industry connections to encourage more tangible support for underrepresented students through internships and scholarships.
“You can only know what you’ve been taught and only know what you’ve seen,” she said. “We want to expose them to the possibilities of the beautiful world of STEM.”
This summer Alvarez was recognized by D CEO with its 2025 Emerging Leader Award for her work with LaBori Boxing and her young students.
Alvarez is so excited about the success of her gym and the attention it’s received that she now plans to open a location in Puerto Rico, recently returning from a trip there to talk to supporters about her plans.
Though she has been passionate about the sport of boxing since she was a teenager, Alvarez has never had the opportunity to compete in the ring as a boxer. She worked with a professional coach in Dallas who encouraged her to try an amateur fight, but life intervened when she found out she was pregnant. Instead, she puts her energies into working with young people.
“I’ve always been a fan of fitness and have done weight training since I was 13 and danced ballet and salsa most of my life,” Alvarez said. “The science behind the effects of exercise on the body is beautiful. Boxing allows us to create an intersection between the sport and its healthy effects on the body.”
