Meet Amanda Alvarez, the Dallas Neuroscientist Running a Nonprofit Boxing Gym
- The LaBori Team
- 22 hours ago
- 5 min read
With LaBori Boxing, the winner of D CEO's 2025 Emerging Leader Award is combining athletics with academia to support East Dallas youth.
By Ben Swanger | July 25, 2025|8:08 am |Photography courtesy of Amanda Alvarez
Born and raised in San Germán, Puerto Rico, Amanda Alvarez didn’t come from a family with ties to boxing. Instead, national legends like Tito Trinidad and Miguel Cotto inspired her to take up the sport at the age of 17. She began by hanging a punching bag in her family’s garage, training with the help of online videos.
Her studies, on the other hand, took her into the medical field. After graduating from high school, Alvarez, whose father is a physician, moved to New York to attend New York University and pursue a degree in neuroscience. At the same time, she intensified her boxing regimen, training with coaches in New York City.
In 2011, Alvarez earned her undergraduate degree and began prepping for fights. While she was training for her debut in the ring, however, she became pregnant. “The train left station, so to speak, on my professional boxing career,” she said with a laugh.
In 2012, she enrolled at The University of Texas at Dallas and five years later earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience. She then took a job in the pharmaceutical industry working in nephrology, studying kidney disease. Over the last three years, she has spent time as a medical consultant specializing in competitive intelligence. She recently published her latest neuroscience paper on how stimulating the vagus nerve—a major nerve that connects the brain to the heart, lungs, and gut—can help the brain strengthen and adjust the connections between its cells, a process called synaptic plasticity, which supports better learning and memory.
But the deeper she got into medicine, the more distant her creative side felt. During the pandemic, she set out to reclaim it—and connect with the Hispanic community in Dallas while doing so. “I loved my career, I love academia, launching into experiments, and trying to figure out what’s going to come next in medicine,” she said. “The pharmaceutical industry is great, but it limits my creativity. And I wanted an outlet for that.” So, a professional salsa dancer, she started free salsa classes in downtown Dallas. Her first class had 13 participants. As the weeks went by, her class grew to as large as 200 student dancers.
Her creativity overflowed, and she felt inspired to do more. Naturally, she turned to her love of boxing. One thing led to another, and she stumbled upon a space to open a gym just west of Tenison Park Golf Course. In short order, she opened her nonprofit boxing gym LaBori Boxing in November 2022. “I think boxing is a great way to connect with youth in the community,” she said, “and I want to use it as a way to promote so many positive things: health and wellness, stress relief, and self-confidence. And because of my passion for STEM, I’ve added a second mission: exposing our youth to various career paths in STEM, to help to bridge the gap in representation in the STEM workforce.
“Boxing can be controversial,” she continued. “It’s very confusing for people, at times, to understand that I am a neuroscientist promoting boxing in youth, but I’d like people to understand that boxing is an incredible builder of self-confidence and an incredible reliever of stress. I think if we can teach our kids at a really young age to grow their self-confidence and to regulate their stress, they’ll grow up to be unstoppable.”
Although most gyms in DFW operate for profit, Alvarez never saw hers as a path to financial gain. After all, she’s not taking a salary. “The barriers to fitness and the barriers to health that exist for families with lower resources, and within minority communities, are high,” she said. “So it was very important to me that this program was as accessible as possible—physically with our location and financially with our free programming for children up to high school-aged students. So it had to be a nonprofit. I was adamant about.
“I’ve had a lot of pushback from other people, especially in the boxing world, who have tried something similar,” Alvarez continued. “I’ve had a lot of pushback from people telling me, ‘You can’t make it completely free. It’s never going to work.’” As it turns out, it’s working so far. And its resulted in her earning D CEO‘s Emerging Leader of the Year in this year’s Nonprofit & Corporate Citizenship Awards.
Since its launch, the gym has doubled in size. Alvarez recently took control of a neighboring unit and knocked down a wall to combine the spaces. “We were in a slightly limited space, bursting at the seams,” she said. “We are now able to add more equipment. For the last couple of years, we’ve been a boxing gym without a ring, but now with our new space, we’re working with [pro boxer Jake Paul’s] nonprofit, Boxing Bullies, to bring in a ring so our students can practice boxing within a ring. Most of the students who walked through our door when we started had never boxed before or had little experience. But now they’re becoming little boxers.”
With an annual budget of $150,000, the gym’s adult programming helps fund the programming for youth. However, even then, at just $10 per class, it remains one of the most affordable gym classes in Dallas. (The average 45-minute fitness class in Dallas costs $35.) The gym’s funding is allocated toward operational expenses, programming, and compensation for the gym’s coaches. “So far, all our coaches have been there since the beginning,” she said.
The gym hosts free STEM workshops every six weeks for its involved youth. Its programming includes everything from dinner discussions with medical professionals and hands-on experiments with Raytheon engineers to interactive activities like dry ice demonstrations, fire experiments, and brain dissections. Alvarez dreams of partnering with companies in the STEM space to offer her high school students summer jobs and internships, while also collaborating with local universities to create scholarship opportunities.
LaBori Boxing also works closely with Buckner International’s foster care program and allows women aged 18 to 24 who have aged out of the foster care system to join in on free fitness classes at the gym.
As of three weeks ago, Alvarez has put her medical consulting career on hold to focus entirely on her boxing endeavors. Moving forward, Alvarez has her focus on bringing in more women and girls to the gym. She’s also pushing into mental and brain health programming for the gym and the entire industry.
Alvarez is the first to acknowledge there are both positive and negative impacts on the brain as a result of the sport. As she says, it’s sometimes weird to tell people she’s a neuroscientist who has pivoted to boxing. “But I’m starting to work with a few sanctioning bodies on how we can put measures into place to create awareness, create knowledge, lower the stigma, and then have a support network for boxers when it comes to mental health and brain health,” she said.
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