Veronica Toro Arana, MD

Veronica Toro Arana, MD, is a cardiothoracic surgery fellow at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles, CA. She was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she grew up with her parents and her younger brother Sebastian. She left Puerto Rico in 2012 to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with the goal of becoming a physician engineer. During her time at MIT, she picked up rowing as a freshman novice and quickly fell in love with the sport. Toro Arana started competing for the Puerto Rico National Rowing Team in 2014. In the spring of 2016, she missed qualifying for the Olympics by a few seconds at the continental qualification regatta, but that fall she started medical school at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. After her second year of medical school, Toro Arana took 2 years off to focus on research and train for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Shortly after the Olympics, Toro Arana resumed her clinical duties at Stanford and received her MD in 2023.