I was born and raised in the Philippines. I moved to the U.S. in my early teens, and earned an undergraduate degree in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994. I then proceeded with graduate work in Gerry Borgia's lab at the University of Maryland, College Park. I finished in 2000, and received a NSF Bioinformatics Postdoctoral Fellowship to work with John Endler at the University of California, Santa Barbara. During this time, I started my work on plumage evolution in manakins, which became a major project in the Uy lab. In 2002, I accepted a faculty position at San Francisco State University then moved to Syracuse University in 2004. From 2011-2019, I was the Aresty Chair in Tropical Ecology at the Unversity of Miami. In 2020, I joined the faculty of the University of Rochester.