Dr. Perez received a Ph.D. in physical therapy from the University of Miami School of Medicine.

She attended the University of Copenhagen as a post-doctoral fellow where she studied transmission in spinal cord networks. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Human Motor Human Cortical Physiology and Stroke Neurorehabilitation Section at the National Institutes of Health, where she focused on studies of cortical physiology and plasticity.

Her main research interests are in understanding how the brain and spinal cord contribute to the control of voluntary movements in healthy humans and in individuals with spinal cord injury. She uses this mechanistic knowledge to develop rehabilitation therapies following CNS damage.