Armando Ruiz was born and raised in Pismo Beach, the City of Endangered Clams and award winning clam chowder. Under the cruel tutelage of Cal Poly professors, he sacrificed his sanity, savings account, and weekends to labor for degrees in both the time-honored discipline of philosophy and the commercially viable field of biotechnology. He mastered the art of coming up with interpretations and reinterpretations for uninterpretable texts as well as perfecting the mental focus for his blindfolded, one-legged, plasmid pipetting pose. His favorite beer is Heineken. He also comes from a background in violence prevention, teaching comprehensive sex ed and medical scribing, and is now deciding among emergency, internal, family or psychiatric medicine. Aside from the second-year grind of medical school, he spends his time honoring the dead as an Anatomy Lab Teaching Assistant, tutoring medical Spanish, and finding out what the numbers mean as Chief Financial Officer of Vi Corporation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that serves the Inland Empire. In his free time, he enjoys learning history, playing video games, building metal puzzles, crocheting beanies to keep his ears warm and drawing. He has chosen the path of becoming a lethal weapon in the martial art of Hapkido. He will be testing for the orange belt soon. He considers walking his dog named Ruby his most spiritual practice because he simply never feels closer to Mother Earth than when he's bagging her poop and wiping her muddy paws.