Roodolph was born and raised in Haiti. He emigrated to the United States back in 2005, completed high school in Boston in 2006, and earned the Valedictorian mantle of his class at Cathedral High School. He graduated with a B.S. in Chemistry with honors from the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2011. From there, Roo worked as a research technician at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Dr. James Bradner’s lab.

Roo is currently a graduate student in the Chemical Biology Program at Harvard University finishing his doctorate studies under the tutelage of Dr. Cigall Kadoch. During his graduate studies, he has won a number of awards that have propelled and sustained his academic growth as a scholar. Roo is particularly proud of the Landry Cancer Biology Fellowship and the Individual Predoctoral F31 Fellowship, which are immensely competitive for graduate students.

Beyond the academic world, Roo has had the opportunity to serve on countless outreach causes to help underrepresented students enter and thrive in the STEAM pipeline. Roo had the privilege to serve on the most recent Harvard Presidential Search Advisory Committee, which weighed in on an exhaustive search for the University’s 29th President, Lawrence S. Bacow.

Beyond the Ph.D., Roo plans to secure a Postdoctoral position in Cancer Drug Discovery with the ultimate goal of running a laboratory that thrives at the intersection of basic chromatin biology and cancer drug discovery.