Santiago earned his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Florida in 2016. During his undergraduate studies, he researched the personalized effects of hypertensive drugs on patients with primary hypertension in the Simmons Mechanobiology Lab. Santiago joined the Regenerative Biomaterials & Therapeutics Group in 2016 to focus on developing corneal stromal tissues for transplantation. Santiago is a GEM scholar and active member of the Graduate Student Assembly at Carnegie Mellon University.