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Zujaja Tauqeer
Science, Politics and Pakistan
Zujaja Tauqeer, a senior at Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College, is one of only two students from New York State to receive a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship in the fall of 2011. The Rhodes, first awarded in 1902, is considered the premiere academic award in the world. It covers all expenses for two or three years of study at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.
Tauqeer, who will study for a master's degree in the history of medicine, participates in Brooklyn Colleges' combined B.A-M.D. program with the New York State Downstate College of Medicine. For her Rhodes study, she plans to pursue an M. Phil. in the history of medicine, concentrating on the relationship between state and science in her native Pakistan. She said the scholarship "will give me invaluable training as an historian in order to formulate national and international public health policies attuned to the historical context of Pakistan and other developing countries in the Islamic world."
She has done research in the neuroscience of autism and has written about radicalization in Pakistan. She lives in Staten Island and is a history major in a combined degree program for a medical degree at the New York Downstate College of Medicine.
"Zujaja is a remarkable woman — an outstanding scholar and with a demonstrated commitment to using that scholarship for the benefit of others," said Dean Ann Kirschner, University Dean of Macaulay Honors College of The City University of New York. "She has achieved more in her two decades than most of us will in a lifetime — I am extremely proud of our second Rhodes Scholar!"
President Karen L. Gould of Brooklyn College said, "Brooklyn College's third Rhodes Scholar, Zujaja Tauqeer, embodies our students' exemplary academic strengths and character. Her strong intellect, her work as an emergency medical worker and a volunteer at local neighborhood health clinics, as well as her deep commitment to clinical research are the attributes that have set her apart as an outstanding scholar and citizen. I am sure I speak for everyone on campus when I say that we are all extremely proud of her accomplishments."
Tauqeer is the seventh City University student to win a Rhodes. The others are: David L.V. Bauer, Macaulay Honors College/City College, 2009; Lev A. Sviridov, City College, 2005; Eugene Shenderov, Brooklyn College, 2005; Lisette Nieves, Brooklyn College, 1992; Raymond Paretzky, Queens College, 1983; and Robert T. Molloy, City College, 1939.
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Kyle Chais
Medgar Evers Student Named 'Young Futurist'
The Young Futurists are between the ages of 16 and 22 and are committed to making the world a better place. Each year, The Root holds open nominations, seeking candidates who are not only achievers but also innovators in the worlds of green innovation, science and technology, arts and culture, social activism and business enterprise. Past Young Futurists have started nonprofits and invented technologies, among other creative and praiseworthy ventures. Nominations are submitted from across the United States, and only 25 are selected each year.
Medgar Evers College student and new author Kyle Chais is featured in The Root as a 2012 Young Futurist. The 20-year-old psychology major wrote his debut novel, "Nameless," while living in a homeless shelter. "Nameless"chronicles the existence of a fallen angel who inhabits the body of a mortal and experiences the joys and lows of being human. Chais will be donating a portion of his book profits to ART START, an award-winning, nationally recognized model for using the arts to save lives and transform communities.
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Shara Concepcion
For BMCC Student, a Couplet of Wins
You could say that a third of CUNY's best writers attend BMCC — two of the six winners of the inaugural CUNY Undergraduate Poetry (CUP) Awards are BMCC students Shara Concepcion and Ricci Niles.
The CUP competition was born, appropriately enough, on a sunset walk across Brooklyn Bridge. .
Members of the BMCC community had joined a Poet's House event in which dozens of people cross the famous bridge, which has inspired poems by Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop and others, and listen to Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," on the other side.
Among the walkers that evening were BMCC poet and professor of English James Tolan, and life-long poetry fan, BMCC President Antonio Pérez. Naturally, the conversation turned to student writing and student poets.
The resulting Pérez initiative, the first annual CUP award competition, was open to undergraduate writers, CUNY-wide.
"Poetry is one of those activities students do on their own," says Tolan. "We have very few outlets affirming their work, so I think this is huge."Deep water
CUP winner Shara Concepcion also just won a Kaplan Scholarship — up to $20,000 per year for tuition in a four-year college, once she graduates from BMCC.
She plans to be a clinical psychologist. "I took time off from BMCC to be an AmeriCorps member and did disaster relief in Texas after Hurricane Ike in 2009," she says. "I realized then how devastating disasters can be to people's mental health."
What does this have to do with poetry? "That's where poetry comes from," she says, "experience, struggle and triumph."
Her CUP-winning poem, "Contemporary Physics," she says, "is a mix of psychology and poetry." Concepcion grew up in the Bronx and wrote her first poem at age 7; recent inspiration comes from BMCC English professor Robert Lapides.
"He tells us to go into the deep water with our writing," she says. "For me, that meant putting my poems forward for scrutiny, stepping outside my comfort zone."Myth of the starving artist
"I was literally folding a pile of clothing, and the words came pouring from me," says Ricci Niles of her award-winning poem, "Up South."
Niles grew up in Manhattan but feels influenced by the literature and history of the American South.
"On my mother's side," she says, "my roots hail from Texas. Any great writer, they're also prodigious readers. The history and words of what you read stay with you until they come out as your own."
Her family, she says, has always supported her writing. "Our mom made being a professional artist seem like a viable thing," Niles says. "That myth of the starving artist, she made it seem like a myth."
A winner of the BMCC Writing and Literature Faculty Awards last year, Niles is considering different paths once she graduates from BMCC.
"I would like to try my hand at journalism," she says. "It's not entirely creative, but as you progress in your career, you can seek out the stories you want to do."
She's also interested in law; not practicing, necessarily, but working as a community advocate.Lyrical, dramatic and traditional winners
This inaugural CUP competition is judged "blind" — entries remain anonymous throughout the reading process — and drew more than 200 submissions from CUNY.
Sponsored by the President's Office at BMCC, the annual awards will continue to recognize student poetry in the categories of lyric poetry, dramatic monologues and closed/traditional forms.
This year's preliminary judges were Elizabeth Berlinger, Catherine Cammilleri, Aimee Record and Marguerite Rivas, all of whom are poets and BMCC faculty.
The final judge was poet Estha Weiner, author of The Mistress Manuscripts, Transfiguration Begins at Home and (forthcoming from Salmon Press), In the Weather of the World.
"My deepest hope for competitions is that, at their best, they provide external affirmation, which we all need," says Weiner. "Though internal affirmation is the most vital, we all need external also."
An award ceremony, held in BMCC's Hudson Room, honored the six winning student poets — Ricci Niles (BMCC), Mary Williams and Rachel Cartee (both from Hunter College), for lyric poetry; Shara Concepcion (BMCC), for closed/traditional form poetry; and Becky McFalls and Jordan Elizabeth Franklin (both from Brooklyn College), for dramatic monologues.
Click here to read their award-winning work.
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Kevin Magana
Kevin Giovanni Magaña (LaGuardia Community College, A.A. in liberal arts, 2011) and now a student at Georgetown University, will attend the 2012 Junior Summer Institute at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He continues to stay active at LaGuardia, conducting transfer workshops for its students.
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Richard Fisher
A Valedictorian with a Purple Heart
Richard Fisher, City Tech's 2012 valedictorian, did not excel academically in high school. In fact, his average was in the high 70s, and he had to take chemistry twice and go to summer school for math.
Fisher joined the military at 17 and was assigned to the Seabees as a carpenter. Before being deployed to Iraq in 2005, he was stationed in Gulfport, Miss., at the time Hurricane Katrina hit. He and his unit helped clear downed trees and other storm debris on his base and set up temporary quarters for service members' families.
Fisher, who is 25, had been in Iraq only four months before he was wounded by a mortar shell explosion. At 19, he was awarded the Purple Heart.
Fisher, who is in the Naval Reserves, has learned that to succeed, one has to work hard and be determined. He started at the lowest rank in the military and worked his way up to first-class petty officer.
"Before I knew it, I was a mentor to other sailors," he says. "I came to see that no matter what your field is, there will always be someone to learn from and someone to teach. I think becoming a teacher was always in the back of my mind."
Graduating with a BS degree in technology teacher education, he plans to further his dual career as an educator and as a military officer.
"My mom always told me that she could live with me not being a good student, even though she knew I could've done better when I was younger," he says. "What mattered was that I treated everyone with respect and lived by the morals that she and my dad taught me. I can see very clearly now that you can go far in life by working hard and being a good person."
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Antonio Aguirre
Antonio Aguirre (New York City College of Technology, A.A.S. in electrical engineering technology, 2012) has won a coveted paid summer internship in the 2012 National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA/GSFC) Lunar & Planetary Science Academy in Greenbelt, Md. He will be working on the project "Miniaturized IR Spectrometer for Planetary Atmospheres Study" with mentors Dr. Tilak Hewagama and Dr. Shahid Aslam.
Miniaturization of scientific instruments will open exciting new possibilities for future research. They are working on reducing infrared spectrometers to chip-scale devices for studying the atmospheres of planets. Aguirre will gain valuable exposure to experimental techniques involving laboratory infrared optics and be involved in a new research area. He will participate in a group expedition to Arizona to study craters and Martian analogue features. The trip expenses are paid for by the LPSA. Academy dates: June 4 to Aug. 10. Stipend: $4,500.
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Dana Smith
Dana Smith (BMCC, A.A.S, 2012), a computer network technology major, recently worked on a research project through the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation program that focused on the electronic exchange of patient medical records. And this semester, Smith was one of eight CUNY students — and the only one from BMCC — selected to present her findings at a conference at the University of Puerto Rico.
Smith made "key contributions to the project," said her research advisor, Professor Ching-Song Wei of the BMCC Computer Information Systems Department. By putting in 10 to 20 hours a week, he said, "she managed her time exceptionally well, met every deadline and delivered consistently high-quality work."
Smith is also an honors student and a member of BMCC's Out in Two scholarship program, which emphasizes academic excellence and community service. Smith has helped out at the Food Bank of New York and been part of BMCC's Each One Reach One program, which pairs academically challenged students with peer mentors.
"I meet with my mentee every week to talk about her schoolwork as well as other aspects of her life," says Smith.
She credits her success to the support she's had from BMCC. "I've always loved computers, but I never knew which area I ultimately wanted to study," she says. "Working with Doctor Wei has helped me realize that my real passion is computer science and research."
After graduating from BMCC, she looks forward to pursuing bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in computer science.
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Vincent Acevedo
A Victory for Iraq War Vet
Vincent Acevedo will always remember where he was and what he was doing on Aug. 25, 2006.
"I was an explosives handler in the U.S. Marine Corps on assignment in Iraq," he says. "We'd taken over an insurgent stronghold right outside the city of Ramadi, about 65 miles west of Baghdad."
Acevedo and his buddies were bunked down in a house that night when the blast from a rocket-propelled grenade hurled him through a wall. "Thankfully, I'm in one piece," he says quietly. "I had all my gear on, and that saved my life."
In June, Acevedo will graduate with an associate degree in criminal justice and a 3.94 GPA, and in the fall, he'll begin working toward his bachelor's degree at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
But the journey from that terrible night in Ramadi has been anything but smooth. "I'd suffered what was diagnosed as a mild traumatic brain injury," says Acevedo, who was hospitalized at several military hospitals and underwent cognitive rehabilitation to relearn the language and functional skills compromised by his injury.
"Repetition is key to recovery, and I work at it every day," he says. In class, he records lectures and discussions and listens to them at home, over and over.
"I think of the brain as a muscle that has to be constantly trained," he says. "I needed to get my mind right again; I needed to get back to classes. There was no way I was just going to sit around."
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Lucy Leid
Preparing for graduation in May with a master's degree in biological science from Drexel University in Philadelphia, Lucy Leid (Medgar Evers, B.S. in biology, 2008) has been accepted to New York Medical College and Meharry Medical School. She came to Medgar Evers with a GED and says that she's so "thankful that Medgar Evers took a chance on me. It's not about where you go but what you get out of it." Leid's mother graduated from the nursing program at Medgar Evers some 20 years ago. Leid says the key to her success is perseverance and determination.
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Tara Gildea
Finding Her Literary Voice
Her task was simple – researching reviews of Amy Lowell's poetry from the 1910s and 1920s for a professor – but the payoff was immense: Tara Gildea found a literary calling of her own, one that will propel her from Macaulay Honors College at Queens College (2013) into a doctoral program in English literature.
Her ticket is a rare Beinecke Scholarship, one of only 20 awarded across the country in 2012 to help pay for graduate studies in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The grant pays for $4,000 immediately before entering graduate school and $30,000 while pursuing advanced studies. This is CUNY's 10th Beinecke since 1993 and its first since 2004.
Gildea intends to apply to the master of arts program at Oxford University, where she deepened her study of female writers last summer thanks to Macaulay's Opportunities Fund, which gives each student a $7,500 grant for study abroad, unpaid internships and the like. At Oxford, she thrived on the tutorial system, which encouraged her to develop her own vision.
Gildea is the first in her family to go to college. "My dad was born in Ireland and came here in the '70s, and education was a big part of my upbringing," she says.
A resident of Jackson Heights, she graduated from Archbishop Molloy High School in 2009 and was drawn to CUNY because "I'd always heard great things about Queens College and wanted to get into Macaulay because of the personal attention you receive."
As a sophomore, she was chosen as a JFEW Scholar, an honor sponsored for academically strong Macaulay students by the Jewish Foundation for Education of Women; the organization covers the college's opportunities fund for recipients (used for travel and scholarly activities) and provides professional development via workshops, guest speakers and other activities.
Through Macaulay, she found a research assistantship after her freshman year with Baruch journalism professor Carl Rollyson, who has published more than 40 books, including an eclectic array of biographies ranging from Susan Sontag to Marilyn Monroe. He asked her to help delve into Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925), who went toe to toe with Ezra Pound for leadership of the Imagist poetry movement – and lost.
From microfilm and journal articles, Gildea collected a trove of reviews that praised Lowell's poetry while slighting her because of her gender. The critics, she found, did Lowell a great injustice by giving more weight to male contemporaries, particularly Pound. Gildea says she kept digging to give her professor the ammunition needed to restore Lowell "to her proper place as a leader of modern poets."
The next summer, Rollyson asked her to research poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) and found that critics and biographers had done a similar job on her. Mental illness and a turbulent personal life are far juicier to write about than a close reading of her verse. Although life and craft cannot be wholly separated, Gildea argues, not letting Plath's poetry speak for itself diminishes her as a poet and an influence.
At Oxford last summer, Gildea plunged into a different century and a different medium, Jane Austen's "Emma" (1815), which she found "utterly subversive" in its critique of marriage. Emma, the central character, is perhaps the spunkiest of Austen's heroines, but Gildea says she's never able to fully develop "her own story" because of the marriage-plot convention, which sends her into marriage with Mr. Knightly. "Society's pressure to marry undermines Emma's independent will," she says.
"I love research," Gildea says. "I haven't picked my field, but I'm interested in British literature, in women writers and in the portrayal of women in literature, as well."
Her eventual goal is to become a literature professor – and to keep doing research. She wants to seek out marginalized writers like Lowell, to help ensure that their work – to use a phrase from Lowell's acid-etched account of her failed assault on Pound, "The Dinner-Party" – would not be "wasted/In a foolish cause."
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Ellen Leitman
She's Finding a New Pathway
Why can the immune systems of some children destroy the HIV virus but most can't? Is it possible to develop a vaccine that would let HIV-infected people stop taking antiretroviral drugs, which prevent their infection from turning into full-blown AIDS?
These are among the questions that Ellen Leitman (Hunter 2010, now finishing her second year in an MD/PhD program at Harvard Medical School) hopes to answer as she pursues a doctorate at Oxford University through a highly competitive 2012 Clarendon Fund Scholarship. It covers tuition and college fees, plus has a generous grant for living expenses.
Launched by Oxford University and financed by Oxford University Press in 2001, the Clarendon Fund opened to applicants of all nationalities in 2011, when it accepted scholars from 46 countries. The program chooses fewer than 7 percent of applicants.
Leitman is CUNY's second Clarendon recipient, joining 2011 Clarendon winner Kunchok Dolma (Macaulay Honors College at Lehman College valedictorian, 2009; Watson Fellow, 2006, New York City Urban Fellow, 2010), who is pursuing a master's degree in international relations.
"Scholars are selected from the leaders in their field," according to the Clarendon website. That is, academic departments nominate whom they believe are the most deserving of their place at the University of Oxford based on their academic record and ability to contribute significantly to their field of study, both in the present and future. This feature ensures the best and brightest minds are selected as Clarendon scholars."
"I'm very excited," says Leitman, particularly because the pediatric HIV laboratory at Oxford where she will study is allied with a research center in South Africa, where at least 11 percent of the population -- and in some provinces and populations far more -- is infected with the virus. "They have already established cohorts of infected children, because HIV is so huge there, and it will be great to be able to work with those researchers and children."
She already has a feel for such research, having worked in a South African lab last summer that worked with adults. "I got very interested in both immunology research and the clinical aspect of HIV treatment," she says.
This was an evolution of her thinking about fields of research. Having probed cell biology while earning her Hunter degree in biological sciences, she initially considered stem cell research. Through Macaulay Honors College and with a nudge from her Hunter mentors Carmen Melendez-Vasquez and Roger Persell, she also conducted neurological research at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., in the summers after her sophomore and junior years.
"That was the turning point for me. I said to myself, 'I have to do research. I can't live without research.'"
She explored misregulation of axonal transport in various neurodegenerative diseases – that is, the simultaneous movement of proteins and other materials to and from the neuron's cell body to the nerve fiber terminals. Beyond that, she was captivated by the atmosphere at Woods Hole. "Famous scientists from all over the world, lots of lectures and seminars, classes to attend. And it's beautiful – forests, lakes, it's fantastic."
Leitman, born in Belarus to parents who were chemical engineers in the former Soviet Union, came to the United States six months before she started at Hunter. She spoke English well, having studied it in Belarus and having spent a high school year in Alamagordo, New Mexico. Her academic talent was quickly realized. As a sophomore, she was awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, which Congress created to help provide a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians and engineers.
Research runs in the family. Her sister has just finished a PhD in molecular biology at Tel Aviv University.
At Harvard Medical School, her "new pathway" program integrates the biological, social, behavioral and clinical sciences over four years. It allows a break for a PhD (Oxford offers an equivalent D.Phil.) after the first two years. When Leitman returns after an anticipated three years at Oxford, she will finish the two clinical years of medical school.
"I'm not that concerned about time; it's about priorities," she says of the continuing stretch of education.
As for her future in medicine, she says "maybe immunology, maybe pediatrics" but acknowledges that "many medical students change their ideas about a specialty" as training progresses. However, she adds, "I'd like to be able to practice medicine and to do research. I want to do both."
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Yekaterina Garmash
A Fellowship That Really Adds Up
Take a girl from Ukraine, stir in some salsa, add a healthy dose of mathematics, simmer in an undergraduate teacher-training program, and you have a $100,000 Math for America Fellowship winner.
That's the recipe followed by Yekaterina Garmash – Ye-kat to her friends – one of four CUNY students this year to capture the highly selective, five-year MƒA program for students who commit to teaching math in New York City's public secondary schools. She and Michael McDonald graduate from City College in 2012; the others are their friend, Mallory Torres Villa (City College 2011), and someone they don't yet know, Umussahar "Sahar" Khatri (Queens College 2012).
"We are the three," Garmash said of her City College friends. "Knowing that we all got into Math for America together was the ice cream on our pie."
This year's 22 New York City Math for America Fellows will receive a full-tuition scholarship for a master's degree in secondary mathematics education at City College of New York, which replaces New York University and Bard College as MƒA's host school. Other incoming MƒA students earned their bachelor's degrees at schools including Boston, Bucknell, Northwestern, SUNY-Stony Brook and Wesleyan universities, Carleton College and the College of William and Mary.
MƒA, a privately funded nonprofit that operates in seven U.S. cities, switched to City College because it wanted a partnership with a public university in New York. MƒA has said it was impressed with City College's math and math education faculty and secondary math education program.
MƒA and CUNY are designing a three-semester master's program that is tailored to the needs of mathematically sophisticated students. MƒA fellows will complete their degree during year one of the five-year fellowship. The program's goal is to provide a rich clinical training experience to prepare MƒA fellows for the rigors of the New York City classroom.
But more than a specialized master's program separates Math for America from other organizations that encourage people to go into public school teaching. In New York, MƒA fellows receive a $30,000 stipend in the first year and $70,000 paid over the next four years, when fellows also teach full time and earn a teacher's salary.
This stipend is an incentive for fellows to stick it out through the difficult first years of teaching, when attrition of inexperienced teachers is highest. MƒA also provides its fellows with mentoring and professional development during the five fellowship years; studies have shown that the lack of support is a key factor in decisions to quit teaching.
Garmash said she was excited to win the fellowship. "I was nervous about the outcome because I knew the standards were high for this program," she said. "I was extremely happy and excited when I found out I was accepted."
During her undergraduate program, she got to see public school teachers up close. "Teachers burn out after a while," she said. "I love teaching, and I don't want that to happen to me. The professional development that MƒA provides gives you that push to make it more enjoyable."
She had liked math in high school and was surprised when the CUNY placement exam showed that she didn't have college-level skills. She took pre-calculus in a summer class before her freshman year, retook the test and was on her way to a major in mathematics education and a minor in mathematics.
"I love algebra and geometry," she said.
During her undergraduate training, she taught trigonometry, high school algebra 2 and middle-school integrated algebra.
Born in Ukraine and fluent in Russian, Garmash and her family moved to Washington Heights when she was 3, plunging not only into American culture but also into Dominican culture.
"In my neighborhood, there's one block with Russians, but it's not a young population, and I don't relate to them as much as to the Hispanic community," she said. "They've influenced me with music and dance" – indeed, she became president of the CCNY Salsa-Mambo Club – "and that might have been a motivation to teach in New York City, because I want to be here. I want to make this community even better."
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Umussahar Khatri
Calculating Her Math Career
Umussahar "Sahar" Khatri was just 5 when she and her mother left Pakistan to join her father, who had established himself in Queens, N.Y. As the oldest of five children in a traditional family, she grew up tutoring her siblings and serving as a bridge between countries and cultures old and new. Those two forces shaped her studies, campus activism and decision to become a New York City public school math teacher.
As she graduates in 2012 with a BS in mathematics with a concentration in secondary education from Macaulay Honors College at Queens College, Khatri is one of four CUNY students in 2012 to capture a $100,000 Math for America (MƒA) Fellowship. This highly selective, five-year program is for outstanding mathematics students who commit to teaching in New York City's public secondary schools. The others are from City College: Yekaterina Garmash and Michael McDonald (2012) and Mallory Torres Villa (2011).
This year's 22 New York City Math for America Fellows all will receive a full-tuition scholarship for a master's degree in secondary mathematics education at City College of New York, which replaces New York University and Bard College as MƒA's host institution. Other incoming MƒA students earned their bachelor's degrees at schools including Boston, Bucknell, Northwestern, SUNY-Stony Brook and Wesleyan Universities, Carleton College and the College of William & Mary.
MƒA, a privately funded nonprofit that operates in seven U.S. cities, switched to City College because it wanted a partnership with a public university in New York. MƒA has said it was impressed with City College's math and math education faculty and secondary math education program.
MƒA and CUNY are designing a three-semester master's program that is tailored to mathematically sophisticated students. MƒA fellows will complete their degree during year one of the five-year fellowship. The program's goal is to provide a clinical training experience to prepare MƒA fellows for the rigors of the New York City classroom.
But more than a specialized master's program separates Math for America from other organizations that encourage people to go into public school teaching. In New York, MƒA fellows receive a $30,000 stipend in the first year and $70,000 paid over the next four years, when fellows teach full-time and earn a teacher's salary.
This hefty stipend is an incentive for fellows to stick it out through the difficult first years of teaching, when attrition of inexperienced teachers is highest. MƒA also provides mentoring and professional development during the five fellowship years; studies have shown that lack of support is a key factor in decisions to quit teaching.
Education was an early passion as Khatri took CUNY College Now classes at Queens College through Benjamin N. Cardozo High School. "I was really inspired by my teachers," she says, adding that she tries to bring the same verve to her classes.
As a senior in Queens College's teacher-preparation program, she taught sixth- and eighth-grade mathematics at I.S. 499, the Queens College School for Math, Science and Technology, then geometry at Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical High School in Jamaica, Queens. She liked having double periods with the middle-school students but also enjoyed the more content-specific, higher-level subject in high school. In addition, she coached high school math students through the nonprofit Let's Get Ready program and also was a private math tutor.
"I didn't realize how much work went into being a teacher," she says. "It's not only about the lesson at the moment; it's the planning, the interaction with students during the session, and then reflecting on what you've done."
As a student teacher, she says, "I teach the same lesson twice, so I think on what I taught and how to modify it. I'm getting comfortable with my students and the whole planning and post-planning process."
MƒA attracted her because most other postgraduate fellowships – including those by the city department of education – are designed for career-changers who lack pedagogical training. Khatri, in contrast, is graduating with New York State teacher certification.
MƒA offers "a lot of support that you have to have, especially as a new teacher. And mental support, because it's an overwhelming field," she says. "I also like that the master's is in one year, so that you're able to focus on the school aspect. A lot of my friends are teaching full time and also are full-time graduate students. That's a lot to cope with."
The money doesn't hurt, either. "It's wonderful," she says.
Khatri says that high school "is always transitional for everyone," but following 9/11, "for me, it was finding my identity as both Muslim and American. Most schools where I've studied, observed and done fieldwork are so multicultural, it helps."
Through Macaulay's Opportunities Fund, she deepened her knowledge of Arabic, which she had studied on her own for three years, at the World Learning Center in Muscat, Oman. "It's an amazing place and very safe," she says. "I'm planning on going back and studying more seriously. In academic courses, you learn classical Arabic, but each place has its own colloquial usage, so speaking in real-life interactions is different."
At Queens College, she was vice president of the Muslim Students Association and a student facilitator at the Center for Ethnic, Racial and Religious Understanding, which promotes dialogue. Through the center, she was involved in dialogue concerning the controversy over Park 51, the proposed Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center, while engaging in a variety of issues ranging from immigration (after Arizona enacted an aggressive law), to Palestine and Israel, to the economic crisis, homelessness, "and stereotyping in general." Her campus activism included work with other organizations such as Hillel.
At home, she speaks Urdu as well as English, and she has acquired a working proficiency in Spanish. A sister, Wajiha, just finished her freshman year at Queens. A brother and sister are in high school; her youngest sibling is 5.
"I walked through the doors of Queens College very determined to become a teacher from the very first day," she says. "Four years later, I am glad to see it become a reality with the support of faculty and advisors in the Math and Education Departments, through my fieldwork, particularly student teaching, and now through this amazing fellowship. Now, I am determined to not only be a teacher, but also to be someone who inspires students to reach their full potential."
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Michael McDonald
Counting on the Future
Michael McDonald thought he wanted to study architecture when he started at City College, but he quickly gravitated toward mathematics education.
"I'd done private tutoring and found it rewarding, so why not translate that to the classroom?" he says.
He soon made two friends in an undergraduate teacher-training program at the college, his 2012 classmate Yekaterina Garmash and Mallory Torres Villa, who was one year ahead. As they moved toward BS degrees in mathematics with a concentration in secondary education, they set their sights on the $100,000 Math for America (MƒA) Fellowship. This highly selective, five-year program is for outstanding mathematics students who commit to teaching in New York City's public secondary schools.
"To be honest, I wanted it really badly. I never wanted anything more," McDonald says. "As excited as I was to win the fellowship, I was even more excited that all three of us made it into the program."
A fourth CUNY student, Umussahar "Sahar" Khatri of Queens College, joins them in the cadre of 22 New York City Math for America Fellows.
They will receive a full-tuition scholarship for a master's degree in secondary mathematics education at City College of New York, which replaces New York University and Bard College as MƒA's host institution. Other incoming MƒA students earned their bachelor's degrees at schools including Boston, Bucknell, Northwestern, SUNY-Stony Brook and Wesleyan Universities, Carleton College and the College of William & Mary.
MƒA, a privately funded nonprofit that operates in seven U.S. cities, switched to City College because it wanted a partnership with a public university in New York. MƒA has said it was impressed with City College's math and math education faculty and secondary math education program.
MƒA and CUNY are designing a three-semester master's program that is tailored to mathematically sophisticated students. MƒA fellows will complete their degree during year one of the five-year fellowship. The program's goal is to provide clinical training to prepare MƒA fellows for the rigors of the New York City classroom.
But more than a specialized master's program separates Math for America from other organizations that encourage people to go into public school teaching. In New York, MƒA fellows receive a $30,000 stipend in the first year and $70,000 paid over the next four years, when fellows teach full time and earn a teacher's salary.
This hefty stipend is an incentive for fellows to stick it out through the difficult first years of teaching, when attrition of inexperienced teachers is highest. MƒA also provides mentoring and professional development during the five fellowship years; studies have shown that the lack of support is a key factor in decisions to quit teaching.
McDonald says that since the fifth or sixth grade, he knew he was "pretty good in math." In college, he took classes in abstract algebra and non-Euclidean geometry – "things that I won't necessarily teach in a middle school or high school classroom, but it's good to know these things are out there. If I could ever integrate them, I'd have the knowledge base to build upon."
Born and raised in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, McDonald went to public and Catholic schools before being drawn to City College's honors program, which provided a full scholarship. During his undergraduate teacher training, he got to work with eight teachers at three schools. He also became president of the Aspiring Teachers Club.
"I would have become a teacher even if I hadn't been accepted into MƒA," he says, "but winning this fellowship has been a true blessing because I now know that if I struggle or am in need of assistance, the highly supportive staff at Math for America will be there to encourage and help me. I hope to inspire confidence and enthusiasm in mathematics in the coming generations of students and innovators. I am so grateful to both City College and Math for America for such an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."
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Mallory Torres Villa
Problem Solver
As a freshman, Mallory Torres Villa joined City College's soccer team and quickly became team captain, a post she held for three years until an injury benched her. "Maybe my coach saw leadership skills," she says.
Maybe that's also what the Math for America interviewer saw when she asked what Villa would do if she did not win the prestigious $100,000 fellowship. "I said, 'Teaching math is what I want to do, regardless.'"
Villa (City College, BS in mathematics with a concentration in secondary education, 2011) is one of four CUNY students to secure a 2012 MƒA Fellowship. This highly selective, five-year MƒA program is for students who commit to teaching math in New York City's public secondary schools. She joins her friends Yekaterina Garmash and Michael McDonald (City College 2012) and Umussahar "Sahar" Khatri (Queens College 2012). They are among the 22 New York City Math for America Fellows.
MƒA provides a full scholarship for a master's degree in secondary mathematics education at City College of New York, which replaces New York University and Bard College as its host school. Other incoming MƒA students earned degrees at Boston, Bucknell, Northwestern, SUNY-Stony Brook and Wesleyan Universities, Carleton College and the College of William & Mary, among other schools.
MƒA, a privately funded nonprofit that operates in seven U.S. cities, switched to City College because it wanted a partnership with a public university in New York. MƒA has said it was impressed with City College's math and math education faculty and secondary math education program.
MƒA and CUNY are designing a three-semester master's program that is tailored to mathematically sophisticated students. MƒA fellows will complete their degree during year one of the five-year fellowship. The program's goal is to provide a clinical training experience to prepare MƒA fellows for the rigors of the New York City classroom.
But more than a specialized master's program separates Math for America from other organizations that encourage people to go into public school teaching. In New York, MƒA fellows receive a $30,000 stipend in the first year and $70,000 paid over the next four years, when fellows teach full-time and earn a teacher's salary.
This hefty stipend is an incentive for fellows to stick it out through the difficult first years of teaching, when attrition of inexperienced teachers is highest. MƒA also provides its fellows with mentoring and professional development during the five fellowship years; studies have shown that the lack of support is a key factor in decisions to quit teaching.
Villa, a native of Colombia, moved with her family to New Rochelle when she was 2½ and attended public schools there. Her undergraduate program, which included extensive classroom experience, allowed her state certification to teach in grades 7 through 12.
"I really want to work with kids, especially since so many of them don't like math," Villa says. "So many have had bad experiences, which may come from elementary teachers who don't have a concentration in math who had bad experiences themselves. The traditional way of teaching math also tends to be a problem: 'Here is the procedure, here is the answer, and there's no way around it.'"
The traditional approach isn't entirely wrong, she says, but a teacher who has a thorough grounding in math and can show students how math relates to their lives may stand a chance. "Students don't realize how much they use math in statistics, in science, in physics and engineering," she says.
Flexibility and keying into students are essential for a teacher's success. "You try to reach every student in class in a different way," she says. "You differentiate your lessons, with more challenging problems for some students and easier ones for others. It takes a lot of years and practice and knowing your students, because every classroom is going to be different."
Tests, she says, are "necessary to pass, but it's more important to look at where students started and where they ended up. You can't put a number to kids' understanding; you need to see progress."
A bureaucratic glitch prevented her from gaining her state certification when she graduated in 2011. But that may have been a fortunate error, because McDonald and Garmash told her about MƒA and urged her to apply with them. "Being accepted together is amazing," she says.
Meanwhile, she was recovering from surgery to repair the tear in her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), which had ended her soccer playing in the summer before her senior year.
To fill her time and earn money, she worked as a dorm counselor at Eastern Soccer Academy, where a brother attended a summer camp. That led to a coaching job at Backyard Sports, which brings sports into the lives of children who have disabilities, including Down syndrome and autism. "This is one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had," she says. "I have been working with them since September 2011 and will definitely continue as long as I can."
During the 2012 spring academic semester, Villa took two master's-level electives at City College that MƒA accepted for credit. One was in technology and education; the other was a content and pedagogy course in middle-school mathematics. "It's been a lot of fun," she says.
She also has been talking with college head soccer coach Don Manfria. After losing seasons under a different coach, he had steered Villa's squad to its first CUNYAC championship in her junior year. "The girls on the team became extremely close and became much more of a family than a team," she says. "I miss playing with them."
There may be a glimmer of hope on that front. The team is open to full-time graduate students, and if Villa has time in her schedule, she would like to find her way back onto the playing field.
It's never too late for leadership.
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Kelechi Ndukwe
Getting to the Root of Stem Cells
Stem cells work like magic, having the capability of transforming themselves into any other type of cell in the body. But how do they know how to perform that trick?
That's one of the big questions that Kelechi Ndukwe (Lehman College BA in biology, 2012) hopes to play a part in answering during his career as a researcher. He became interested in morphogenesis (how organisms form) during his undergraduate work with Lehman Assistant Professor Stephen M. Redenti, who works on stem cells, tissue engineering and nanotechnology.
"How do cells connect? How do they know where to go to form specific organs, like a retina?" asks Ndukwe, a Nigerian immigrant who intends to enter an MD/PhD program. "My work, which is ongoing, is trying to develop cells that can track the migration of progenitor cells."
For the moment, though, those plans will take a back seat to research involving genetics and schizophrenia during a yearlong stint at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) laboratories in Bethesda, Md.
In what is believed to be a first for CUNY, he received a rare 2012 NIH Undergraduate Scholarship, one of only 15 granted this year. Students who win them tend to come from universities with medical schools, which CUNY does not have.
The NIH Undergraduate Scholarships are reserved for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who seek careers in biomedical, behavioral and social science health-related research. They provide up to $20,000 per academic year in tuition, educational expenses and living expenses; paid research training during the summer and paid employment and training at NIH after graduation. Grants can be renewed for up to four years. For each scholarship year, participants commit to a 10-week summer laboratory experience under the mentorship of an NIH investigator and one year of research in a laboratory of their choice.
Ndukwe will work with Joel E. Kleinman, MD, PhD, chief of the neuropathology section and deputy chief of the clinical brain disorders branch at NIH. Kleinman, who has published more than 200 papers primarily on the neuropathology of schizophrenia, seeks the molecular, cellular and genetic mechanisms that underlie the disease.
"The research that Doctor Kleinman is doing will require me to acquire a whole new expertise, but I'm willing to learn from him and see where that goes," Ndukwe says. "He's a physician-scientist, as I want to be, so he is definitely going to be the best mentor for me."
Ndukwe has proven himself adaptable to changing circumstances. In 2007, he and his siblings left Nigeria for New York after they had finished high school. They joined their mother, Ogechi, who had moved here seven years earlier after winning an American visa in a lottery. "It was magical when I came here," he says.
College figured prominently in plans for his family. His mother had been to Lehman, earning a social work degree in 2007 before heading to Yeshiva University for a master's. His sister, Oluchi, is majoring in political science at Lehman.
"If I had stayed in Nigeria, I could have gone to college, but it would have been more difficult," he says. "The fees are pretty high over there." At Lehman, near his home in the Bronx, he was encouraged to pursue his interest in biology.
For example, Redenti connected him with Hunter College Distinguished Professor of Biology Marie Filbin. Working under a grant from the Summer Program for Undergraduate Research in 2009, Ndukwe was able to study in her laboratory, working with a senior scientist in her group to develop a plate-based assay – that is, cells grown in a laboratory dish – to test the effect of myelin, a fatty tissue that insulates nerve fibers in vertebrates, on nerve regeneration. Proteins in myelin prevent nerves from re-growing after injuries ranging from spinal fractures to multiple sclerosis.
Ndukwe has not begun pursuing his long-range goal, starting with applications to an MD/PhD program, but he knows that's what he wants to do. "I want to be both a medical doctor and a researcher," he says. "I want to work with patients and be in a laboratory."
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David Weinberger
Putting Local Government to Work
The very notion of government has taken a beating in the overheated cauldron of politics and the cycle of 24-hour news commentary. But for David Weinberger, government – particularly local government – "is where change happens. One of the purposes of federal government is to prop up state and local governments and let them do their work."
Weinberger (Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, BA in political science and public policy, 2012), will have the opportunity to work in city government full time during a nine-month, $30,000 New York City Urban Fellowship, starting in September 2012.
The highly selective fellowship, sponsored by the City of New York, introduces top college graduates from across the country to public service through work in mayoral offices and city agencies, intensive seminars that explore major urban issues and meetings with policymakers at all levels of government.
Through Macaulay and Hunter, "I've had wonderful opportunities, was encouraged to take each one, and it led me here," he says. "I applied early-decision and never looked back."
This native of Irvington, NY, chose to attend them because of their reputations, affordability and the chance to live in a dorm in New York City. "Both provided internship opportunities and guidance that I wouldn't have gotten elsewhere," he says.
He comes to the fellowship with considerable policy experience. An upper-level political science class on political rhetoric, into which he talked his way as a freshman, set him on his path.
"This hooked me up with advocacy projects around campus, making me more aware of struggles for social justice, food access through NYPIRG and the Roosevelt Institute," the nation's first student-run public-policy think tank, with more than 80 chapters across the country.
He became president of Hunter's chapter and for almost three years held a national post as Roosevelt Institute's senior fellow in energy and environment. As part of that work, he traveled to campuses from Massachusetts to Georgia, giving "Policy 101 presentations to students, showing them how to engage with stakeholders and promote their ideas."
In his national role, he helped students develop policy recommendations and community-impact projects and promote them to government officials and the media. The CUNY chancellor's office asked him to assist the Empire State Development Corp. as an intern overseeing its New York City Regional Council, which was developing a strategic plan to create jobs and revitalize the city's economy.
He interned with Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Transit-Oriented Development Department on "smart-growth" development. He found that position through an online search and paid himself a stipend through Macaulay's Opportunities Fund, a $7,500 allocation that every Macaulay student gets to further education.
At the MTA, he "stumbled across a way they have of doing things in Chicago. They create a district, freeze its property-tax rate for, say, five years, and dedicate whatever additional tax income comes in at the end of that period to pay for public improvements that they do now. In essence, the district gives the city an IOU for future revenue." The city issues bonds to pay for the improvements and pays them off with higher tax revenue later. "It's an intriguing idea," he says. "I wrote memos about it, but it hasn't been approved."
His Macaulay Opportunities Fund also allowed him to afford a semester in Washington with the State Department's Office of Ecosystems and Conservation in 2011. There, he researched compliance with the U.S.-China Ten-Year Framework for Energy and Environment, which since June 2008 has facilitated the exchange of information and best practices to foster innovation and develop solutions to common problems the two countries face. He gathered information from the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Parks Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among other sources, to brief his boss about sustainable park management before a U.S. delegation traveled to Beijing.
Another internship, at the Democratic National Committee in Washington, introduced him to opposition research for the 2010 elections. That post was financed by the Sarah Rosen Fund, which was set up to groom the next generation of Democratic leaders.
Closer to home, he also was community outreach intern at Friends of THIRTEEN, helping to organize a lobbying day where hundreds of people went to Washington to urge continued federal financing of public broadcasting.
He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa; was a William R. Kenan Scholar, which sponsors outstanding Macaulay students who demonstrate an early commitment to service and civic engagement; and a Lisa Goldberg Scholar, an initiative of the Revson Foundation that also is dedicated to civic service and the future of New York City.
This summer, he is working with In Our Backyards, an environmental micro-funding platform that connects small donors with volunteers in New York City.
Weinberger envisions a career in public policy, perhaps as an advocate, and may seek a master's degree in urban planning after he has worked in the field.
"Local government is so powerful. A new wave of change will happen at the local level, given the gridlock in Washington," he says. "It's hard to get any progressive policy through there. But city government has the capacity to be a catalyst. I'll consider myself successful if I can make real and lasting changes in New York City, particularly in environmental protection and public health."
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Patrick Lee
Coming Full Circle
Not far from the glittering casinos that line a strip in Macau, Patrick Lee found people living in squalor.
"A lot of cities are like that," he says. "The disparity is stark, with poor people right next to the rich who ignore them. Macau is a former Portuguese colony with European architecture, so it's more scenic than other parts of China."
Lee (Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, BA in biochemistry, 2012) will have the chance to probe that contrast during his year as a Fulbright U.S. Student Fellow.
He'll be teaching English at a university in Macau, while devoting himself to perfecting his Cantonese. Born and raised in Brooklyn to parents who are from Guangzhou, China, he grew up speaking the language and improved it during an earlier visit to Macau (a special administrative district similar to and nearby Hong Kong) and China. He paid for that trip through Macaulay's $7,500-per-student Opportunities Fund.
He intends to become a physician and has postponed his acceptance to SUNY Upstate medical school. As an undergraduate, he tutored at two nonprofits, Sponsors for Educational Opportunity and Legal Outreach, helping students learn calculus and prepare for the math section of the SATs. On campus, he worked with the Coalition for the Revitalization of Asian American Studies, besides playing alto saxophone with the Hunter Jazz Ensemble.
"I always considered working with Chinese immigrants, giving back to the community, because it's often an underserved population," he says. "Going abroad will help me acquire the language skills and know-how to do this."
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Deborah Ayeni
A Personal Quest To Quell Cancer
From the time her grandmother died of breast cancer in Nigeria, Deborah Opeyemi Ayeni has been "very curious about cancer,' hoping "to understand how it develops, progresses and moves in the body."
Now, with a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Ayeni (City College, 2011) will continue probing cancer-causing genes in her doctoral program in experimental pathology at the Yale School of Medicine. Ultimately, she says, she will look for "ways of interfering with cancer pathways, tumor regression and how cancers develop resistance to chemical agents."
Ayeni emigrated to New York City in 2006 and started at City College the next year. While pursuing a biochemistry major and math minor, she won several scholarships, including the City College Fellowship, which CCNY and the Ford Foundation fund to support PhD-bound students who are interested in research, and a National Institutes of Health Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) Fellowship.
"They provided funding, so I didn't have to worry about working," she says. "The City College Fellowship, especially, really groomed me when I got to the phase of applying to graduate school."
Indeed, she and two classmates who received that fellowship are at Yale. The MARC Fellowship allowed her to go to conferences and "to network with people from all over the country."
She also won a Jonas E. Salk Scholarship for graduate work, which CUNY awards to students who plan careers in medicine and the biological sciences and are deemed likely to make significant contributions to medicine and research. They are selected on the basis of original research papers that they work on with prominent scientist-mentors. Calling the Salk scholarship "very important," she adds, "I feel very honored to be recognized by CUNY."
Ayeni's Salk-winning project, undertaken with City College Professor Barbara Zajc, involved the synthesis of fluorinated alkenes, which are used in pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals, through a process known as Julia-Kocienski olefination. Zajc, she says, "is a great mentor. I developed the skills I have from her. I e-mailed her about two minutes after I found out about the NSF fellowship."
Ayeni anticipates a career in industrial research, perhaps with a pharmaceutical or biotechnology company. At Yale, she is finishing the last of three laboratory rotations – which expose students to different areas and professors within their field of interest – before selecting the path she will follow using the NSF grant. One was in a lab that explores lung cancer metastasis, another was a cancer stem-cell lab that focuses on acute megakaryoblastic leukemia.
She's already made up her mind: The experimental pathology lab where she worked with assistant professor of medicine Katerina Politi. During that rotation, she investigated the role of the Myc family of genes in causing lung tumors. Myc genes are proto-oncogenes, meaning that cancer may result if mutation alters their activity. Preliminary evidence suggests that the level of expression of various members of the Myc family differs in tumors from patients with non-small cell lung cancer.
"I wanted to understand the effect of these genes on tumor growth and to evaluate if they play a role in the development of tumor resistance to certain chemotherapeutic drugs," she says.
Last semester, Ayeni was in the inaugural group of Yale students to receive a Gruber Science Fellowship, which supports graduate students in the physical and life sciences.
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowships are the most prestigious awards a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. Providing $126,000 over three years, they recognize and support exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields.
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Vivienne Baldassare
Exploring the Universe
Every so often, one galaxy collides with another. In any billion years, about 10 percent of fairly bright galaxies are involved in mergers of, well, cosmic proportions. For example, for hundreds of millions of years, our own Milky Way Galaxy has been nibbling at the smaller Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, which intersects the plane of the Milky Way at an angle.
Vivienne Baldassare (Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, 2012) wonders whether there's a relationship between collisions and the detection of X-rays, which spew from the super-massive black hole that's at the nucleus of every galaxy.
Armed with a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, she's about to start doctoral work at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, looking at mergers in ultra-luminous infrared galaxies - that is, in galaxies with an "active" nucleus that emits 1012 times the infrared light that our sun does.
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowships are the most prestigious awards a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. Providing $126,000 over three years, they recognize and support exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields.
"I hope that my research will contribute to our understanding of the role that galaxy mergers and active galactic nuclei play in galaxy evolution," she says.
Her research question arises from the fact that instruments detect X-rays from some galactic nuclei but not others. "One possible explanation is there may be dust blocking the X-rays in the active galaxies for which we don't see them," she says. [Active galaxies have active nuclei, which generate above-average emissions across a broad array of wavelengths.] "In galaxy mergers, a lot of gas and dust come together from the individual galaxies, so it would make sense that their active galactic nuclei are obscured. I'd like to see if galaxies in earlier stages of merger are not detected in X-ray, while galaxies in later stages of mergers are."
A good question, but the merger of two galaxies can span 3 billion years. "In our timescale, I wouldn't expect to see any changes, so I'll need a large sample of galaxies at different merger stages," she says. "Some large astronomical surveys have data for millions of galaxies, so ideally one could use data from these surveys to test predictions like this."
Baldassare knew she'd major in physics when she enrolled at Hunter, but she didn't find her niche until she landed a summer internship after her freshman year through Macaulay Honors College. Associate Professor Charles Liu at the College of Staten Island, who also works in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, asked her to classify galaxies according to their shapes. "I'd never thought about astronomy as a career, but I found I loved it," she says.
She stayed with him a semester longer, leading into a series of projects focused on some of the diverse mysteries of the cosmos.
She worked with her mentor, Kelle Cruz, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Hunter and a research associate in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, to study the age and evolution of brown dwarfs. These are wannabe stars - bigger than gas giant planets, smaller than stars and lacking an energy source at their core. This project was funded by a grant from the John P. McNulty Scholarship Fund for Excellence in Math and Science.
In the summer of 2011, Baldassare moved on to the National Optical Astronomy Observatory under a Research Experience for Undergraduates grant funded by the National Science Foundation.
"We were studying a set of ultra-luminous infrared galaxies, which get their extreme luminosities from active galactic nuclei and/or bursts of star formation," she says. "We had a sample of objects and were testing to see which of those scenarios was playing out."
Baldassare also started a blog, Physicist/Feminist (http://physicistfeminist.wordpress.com/author/vbaldassare/), "because I feel strongly about increasing the representation of women in the sciences. In some sciences, like psychology and biology, the numbers are close to even, but in physics, engineering and math, women are underrepresented."
On her blog and a Twitter feed, she "has gotten good feedback from other women scientists."
A recent blog post recounted a talk at the CUNY Graduate Center by Jill Tarter, the director of the Center for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Not only did Tarter discuss the more than 2,000 distant planets detected so far, some of which may harbor life, but also she "had some great advice (which is relevant for all scientists)." To be:
"Positive. Others can and will try to discourage you. Remain positive and don't let it affect you.
"Realistic. Try to find metrics to measure your own performance. How are you doing in relation to your peers? Figure out what do you need to be able to do the things you want.
"Flexible. You probably won't end your career doing what you started, so be flexible. Figure out what problem-solving skills you have and then figure out what the most interesting problems are. Be willing to use your skill sets to solve these problems.
Kind. Be kind to yourself! And especially be kind to other women. Support other female scientists.
"These are qualities I will definitely try to maintain throughout my career!" Baldassare wrote.
For all her current and prospective exploration of the universe, there is one thing on her wish list that she knows she will never accomplish. "In an estimated five billion years, the Milky Way will merge with Andromeda, the closest large galaxy to us," Baldassare says. "It probably will be very beautiful, and I'm sorry I won't be here to see that."
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Theresa Lynn Carranza-Fulmer
Feeling the Pull of the Earth
Technology has put smartphones in our pockets, GPS in our cars and worldwide video conferencing in our computers. Most of us never think how these modern miracles work – or how fragile is the satellite infrastructure that they rely upon. A blast of solar wind – a stream of charged particles routinely ejected by the sun – could wreak havoc with Earth's magnetosphere and fry the satellites that orbit within it.
That's a real-world implication of the basic research that Theresa Lynn Carranza-Fulmer (City College BS in physics and geology, 2011) is undertaking with the support of a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
These fellowships are the most prestigious awards a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. Providing $126,000 over three years, they recognize and support exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields.
A pre-doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Carranza-Fulmer studies the magnetosphere, a bubble of space shaped by Earth's magnetic field, the solar wind and the interplanetary magnetic field.
"I want to create a spatial and temporal map of geomagnetic field lines for North America's mid-latitudes and then apply new science by interpolating all of the data to get a better understanding of different types of wave fluctuations," she says. "These fluctuations can be correlated to geomagnetic storms and will build our understanding of the sun-Earth connection," she says.
A fuller understanding could lead to an early-warning system for solar activity "that might help save some of our communications satellites," not to mention electrical power grids, which can be disrupted by solar flares or coronal mass ejections.
The sun shoots out these huge "ejects" of superhot plasma at nearly the speed of light; a shock front may race ahead of them and create a magnetic storm on Earth. These gouts of solar plasma "can be very destructive if we have a high stream of solar wind – that is, a large density of particles – coming toward us," she says. "With the right measurements, we can understand the plasmaspheric density along geomagnetic field lines, which can give us a better understanding of the interaction of the sun-magnetosphere-ionosphere connection."
To gather her data, she uses magnetism-measuring devices called magnetometers, which are available worldwide, along with statistical techniques to interpolate missing data. Statistical estimation is needed because magnetometers tend to be concentrated in the high latitudes, and there are fewer in the middle latitudes.
"The problem we've been facing is having a unified way of presenting the data so we can get the bigger picture of what's going on," she says.
Carranza-Fulmer says that as a City College undergraduate, "I had the dilemma of going into physics or geology, because I loved both, so I decided to major in both."
She spent a summer studying solar physics at Montana State University-Bozeman through a National Science Foundation-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates internship. "I learned so much about the sun's magnetic field and was exposed to the sun-Earth connection," she says.
She later worked for a year as a research assistant with the U.S. Geological Survey's geomagnetism program, after having interned there for a summer through a Research Experience in Solid Earth Science for Students also funded by the National Science Foundation. "I knew this is where I needed to be," she says.
Another undergraduate summer internship, at the University of Michigan under her current advisor, Mark Moldwin, resulted in a poster about plasma composition changes during the latest solar cycle (1996-2008). The approximately 11-year-long solar cycles, most notably noted for sunspot activity, also can affect Earth and its satellite communications.
Carranza-Fulmer was born in Texas and moved to New Orleans in time for Hurricane Katrina. She took off three years after high school in 2003 to play drums in jazz and rock bands.
"I wasn't too motivated to go to school," she says.
Then an uncle living in New York City suggested that she check out the schools here. "I visited NYU and Columbia but fell in love with City College and said, 'This is my school.'"
Now 26, she no longer has the time to play music, but she does squeeze in acrobatic aerial performances on the trapeze and the silks (strands of suspended fabric); it gives her an opportunity to try to defy the magnetic pull of Earth.
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Charlie Corredor
Big Ideas at the Nano Level
Nanotechnology is revolutionizing products, from self-cleaning windows to dazzling computer displays, from wrinkle creams to wrinkle-free shirts.
Yet as these products come on the market – some 1,300 in 2008 and far more now – there has been comparatively little attention paid to the potential hazards posed by nanomaterials, which are about the size of proteins and far smaller than the cells in your body.
Discovering how they behave when they're released in the environment (intentionally or not) has broad consequences "not only for us, but for the entire ecosystem," says Charlie Corredor (City College, chemical engineering, 2009), who is in a doctoral program at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is probing the mechanisms of toxicity at the "nano-bio interface" with a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
"What happens when we discard these small materials into waterways? We're killing our environment, our home," he says. "That's the reason I'm doing environmental nanotoxicity. I'm trying to tell the world how we're affecting what we've got."
It's essential to understand how nanomaterials behave when they come into contact with our bodies, where they can infiltrate – and possibly interfere with or kill cells – he says. "We're able to synthesize, create nanorods and nanoshells for basic commercial applications. They are amazing, and that's the way we're going to go. But we have to be concerned about the fact that they will cause us harm. Preliminary data suggest that nanomaterials can penetrate the membranes of cells. We need to know how to use them and use them as best as possible, so this research is a critical step toward developing safe nanoproducts."
Nanomaterials measure 1 to 100 nanometers, or billionths of a meter; for comparison, a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers in diameter. Nanomaterials can be made from carbon, silicon, gold, cadmium, selenium and other basic elements. They take many forms, with nanowires, nanotubes, quantum dots and fullerenes among them. Each has different properties and potential hazards, depending on factors like size, shape, crystal structure and surface coating.
While some researchers in his lab do computer simulations, Corredor runs experiments to better understand these dynamic systems. For the sake of simplicity, Corredor uses models of biological cell membranes that imitate the natural fluidity and permeability of living cells. With them, he probes the mechanisms and conditions under which engineered nanomaterials can penetrate and disrupt cell membranes.
Working in Professor Jonathan Posner's laboratory, he also is involved with research into nanofluidics (the movement of fluids through microscopic pores), nanofuel cells, self-propelled nanorods that might be used to deliver drugs to target sites, and more.
Corredor was born in Riverside, Calif., but spent most of his youth in Europe and South America with his family, including his Colombian mother.
He graduated from City College having published a remarkable seven research papers. Two, in which he was the primary author, were written with CCNY chemistry Professor John R. Lombardi and Marco Leona of the Department of Scientific Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; they recounted research done with the museum and the New York Police Department crime lab that used lasers to quantify and characterize pigments that had been applied in artwork from the 1700s and 1800s.
Lombardi, Corredor says, was extraordinarily supportive and helped him land a grant from CUNY's Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, an alliance of 17 CUNY colleges and the Graduate Center that supports minority students in the sciences. Stokes' City College project director, Claude Brathwaite, and chemical engineering Associate Professor Ilona Kretzschmar became his academic advisors.
They encouraged him to secure three international Research Experience for Undergraduate grants, supported by the National Science Foundation, at Jilin University in China, the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris. "I was able to see how engineering and chemistry were being used in different parts of the world," he says. "That's a unique opportunity for an undergrad." Along the way, he published two more papers.
"During the time I was in France, I was super-happy, doing science, eating croissants and drinking wine," he says. "When I forgot about grad school, the Stokes program stepped in."
Stokes' National Science Foundation-funded Bridge to Doctorate Program provided him a stipend, graduate courses and laboratory research while he prepared for a PhD. During that year, he researched zinc-air batteries at the CUNY Energy Institute with Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering Sanjoy Banerjee and Assistant Professor Daniel Steingart, resulting in another coauthored paper.
He also traveled to graduate schools that interested him, including Arizona State, where he met Posner, "who showed me the passion he had" for research.
So Corredor began his studies at Arizona, and when Posner took an attractive offer to move his operation to the University of Washington, Corredor went with him. Their collaboration has led to two published papers and two more accepted for publication.
"I can't say enough about the support Professor Posner has given me," which includes aid in securing a National Academy Ford Predoctoral Fellowship, as well as the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. These are the most prestigious awards that a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. The Ford grant provides an annual $20,000 stipend, plus $2,000 for tuition and fees in each of three years. The NSF grant is for $126,000 over three years of research.
With such good mentorship behind him, Corredor says he looks forward to the day when he, too, becomes a professor and can nurture upcoming talent.
He has an additional ongoing CUNY connection: his fiancée, Keilys Gonzalez, a 2009 CCNY economics BA classmate who is an accountant at the University of Washington. "We have a CCNY bumper sticker on the back of our car and sweatshirts from CUNY," he says. "I'm proud to be a CUNY alumnus; it was a fantastic experience."
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Zvi Fishman
Opening a Window to the Brain
"Consciousness is perhaps the most important unanswered question in science," says Zvi Hershel Fishman – Hershy to his friends – "and that's the reason I got into neuroscience. What is it in the brain that makes us able to be aware of things, to see colors, to experience sensations?"
Fishman (City College biology BS, 2010) seeks a path to that unanswered question in his doctoral research at Columbia University. He'll be supported with a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the most prestigious award a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. Providing $126,000 over three years, the awards recognize and support exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields.
Having a background in Talmudic scholarship, Fishman came to City College "because I wanted to become a scientist." He graduated first in his biology class with a 4.0 GPA and, at graduation, won the Biology Department's Ward Medal and the Division of Science's highest award, the Gerald S. Brenner Endowed Science Scholarship.
By then, he had distinguished himself in the laboratory of Associate Professor Jay Edelman, where he continued to conduct research for a year after graduation.
"Doing my own research trained me, in a new way, to think like a scientist." Fishman says, adding, "I owe everything to Professor Edelman's support."
In his pursuit of the conscious mind, he was intrigued by Edelman's study of eye movements. Humans and many other animals three-dimensionally map their surroundings through a series of amazingly quick, jerky eye movements called saccades. Saccades are so fast that the brain interprets the visual information as a smooth stream.
Fishman examined how saccadic eye movements reveal the interaction between conscious, voluntary neural motor commands and unconscious, reflexive ones. Utilizing work by Edelman and his student Kitty Xu (City College biology BS, 2009, who is working on a PhD in cognitive psychology at Johns Hopkins University), he asked test subjects to follow visual clues on a computer screen.
When he inserted a surprise visual stimulus near a point to which they had been instructed to move their eyes, a saccade followed immediately, but it was directed mainly to the original goal and only minimally to the surprise. Fishman clarified Edelman's and Xu's earlier work by showing that subjects tended to seek the goal regardless of its spatial relationship to the goal.
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Therese Kobanghe
Fighting for Those Who Can't
"I want to be secretary-general at the United Nations, fighting crimes against humanity," says Therese Harmonie Kobanghe, who moved from France by herself three years ago to attend LaGuardia Community College and fulfill her goal.
Now, with a prestigious 2012 Jack Kent Cooke Transfer Scholarship and her liberal arts associate degree in hand, she is heading to Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service on a full scholarship. She intends to study international relations and women's studies.
The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation provides up to $30,000 per year to each of approximately 50 deserving students selected annually, making it the largest private scholarship for two-year and community college transfer students in the country. Each award is intended to cover a significant share of the student's educational expenses – including tuition, living expenses, books and required fees – for the final two to three years necessary to achieve a bachelor's degree. Awards vary by individual, based on the cost of tuition as well as other grants or scholarships he or she may receive.
Her interest in international relations and women's studies has deep and personal roots. Violence forced her mother to flee the Democratic Republic of Congo for France 23 years ago when she was pregnant with Harmonie, as she prefers to be called.
When she graduated from high school, Kobanghe visited Congo for the first time. "I met a girl who was about my age who had been raped by a Congolese soldier. That opened my eyes to gender-based violence in the country. I'd like to go back to Congo to work with survivors, despite the violence that is still going on there. With the help of other people who are interested in empowering women, we will be able to disturb the status quo."
She also knows the power of education first-hand. "The best thing that ever happened to me is growing up in a notorious Parisian neighborhood ... a crime-infested neighborhood where drug dealing and prostitution were common," she wrote in her application to the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. "I a desperate attempt to get me back on track, my mother made the drastic decision to send me to a Catholic boarding school in Brittany, which had awarded me a scholarship to supplement the meager funds that she had scraped together for my tuition. As one of only three black students, i felt ostracized and abandoned. However, my temporary exile changed me from a sneaky vagabond to a bookworm, as I was able to escape racism by losing myself in books and my studies."
At LaGuardia, she won two America Rising Scholarships and was one of 20 CUNY students chosen for the Edward T. Rogowsky Internship Program In Government and Public Affairs, a program she was referred to by a LaGuardia professor. She was elected vice president of the New York Southern Region of Phi Theta Kappa, the honor society. She also was a founding member and is now co-chair of LaGuardia's Honors Student Advisory Committee, which focused on research and on building a network of honors alumni.
Kobanghe says she is certain the well-rounded education she received at LaGuardia will help her realize her dream. "I learned more about politics and society in my Philosophy of Religion class than I would have in a paralegal or business class," Kobanghe says. "The students are open, and the professors don't impose their opinion."
From fall 2010 to spring 2011 she worked as a volunteer social worker at the Central Punitive Segregation Unit at Rikers Island, an endeavor she embarked upon alone with no organizational affiliates. She's soft-spoken and only five feet tall, so it's hard to imagine her among male inmates who've been isolated for misconduct. Still, Kobanghe insists it's what she wants to do. "They talk to me; I help them with their problems," she says.
Kobanghe interned in the office of New York State Sen. Malcolm A. Smith. Her eyes gleam when she speaks about a rally against gun violence she helped organize. Some 300 people marched from the United Nations to Times Square on a cold Sunday morning, Kobanghe alongside them.
"I want to make a difference, a positive one," she says.
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Andrew Fulmer
Counting All His Chickadees
Lots of animals hide food to eat later, but many won't do so if another animal is watching. After all, that other animal might try to steal the food. A chickadee, however, may cache food in the presence of another chickadee.
"Do chickadees develop trusting relationships that supersede normal anti-theft behavior?" asks Andrew Goldklank Fulmer, a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center. "And, if so, at what stages of development do they have to meet the other birds for that to happen? Does spending a first winter with another individual encourage food caching in front of that individual later in life?"
Hoping to answer those questions, Fulmer intends to spend considerable time observing the behavior of individual chickadees. He will be supported by a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the most prestigious award that a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. Providing $126,000 over three years, the grants recognize and support exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields.
He will conduct his research in Black Rock Forest in Cornwall, N.Y., in nearby Orange County. Black Rock is a nearly 4,000-acre natural living laboratory for field-based scientific research and education. It is run by a consortium of colleges and universities, public and independent schools and scientific and cultural institutions; among them is City College of New York.
Why did he choose to study chickadees? "Most importantly, I've always been fascinated by the variety of social behaviors different animals exhibit. Every species has different needs, and they all meet those needs in unique ways. Chickadees are special because they're known to have a strong audience effect – that is, they don't cache food in front of neighbors. But they also have periods of life where it's important for them to cooperate with other chickadees, such as when they form loose flocks during winter, huddling together for warmth. If they have a relationship with another chickadee earlier in life – a clutch mate, or a parent or an unrelated bird that they grow up with – will that alter their caching behavior?"
He says he'll track "a series of individual birds over the winter, observing their social association patterns, and provision subgroups with food under certain circumstances. I'll do that over a period of developmental time that allows me to see what happens over the life cycle of given birds. I'd like to see, for example, whether good experiences with other birds as juveniles might increase food sharing with those birds and whether a reduction in resources might decrease sharing."
Fulmer was born in Manhattan and attended Hunter College Elementary and High Schools. He earned his bachelor's degree in zoology at Hampshire College in 2010. For a year after graduation, he did field work in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa with the Kalahari Meerkat Project, which attracts zoologists from all over the world. This research station, in part run by Cambridge University, also was the site of Animal Planet's "Meerkat Manor" TV series.
"Working there was a lot of fun," he says. "Meerkats are an excellent example of the kind of animal that lends itself to social behavior research. They live in groups with exclusive membership and cooperate with one another in many ways. They do not usually survive long by themselves."
As an undergraduate, he spent a winter studying bats in Costa Rica with German researcher Mirjam Knörnschild. He was lead author on a paper they published in the Journal of Ethology on a topic related to his upcoming work on chickadees – association choice, intracolonial social distance and signaling modalities in greater sac-winged bats (Saccopteryx bilineata).
"These are bats that are awake and doing their socializing during the day," Fulmer says. "They hang out on the same roofs, which lets me observe the distance they keep from each other. They're in harem-based families, so it's interesting to see how far apart the females are from each other and how far each harem is from other harems. Males who aren't in the harem tend to associate more with one another than with the females in the harem that they were trying to access. It's a cool system."
And, he adds, researching them came with an unexpected benefit. "These bats eat mosquitoes, so they're good to hang out with when you're in the jungle."
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Belen Guerra-Carrillo
Brain Changer
What physically happens in the brain when people learn and how do those changes affect academic performance?
Those are among the questions that Belén Carolina Guerra-Carrillo (Baruch, BA in psychology, 2010) intends to explore in a doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley that she will start in the fall.
She's undertaking this research with the support of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the most prestigious award that a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. Providing $126,000 over three years, the grants recognize and support exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields.
In her experiments, Guerra-Carrillo intends to train reasoning skills and working memory in children and adults by asking them to play games that require them to hold items in mind or to make relationships between objects.
Initially, her research will look for behavioral improvements in these tasks. Later, she intends to use neuroimaging to see the physical effects of this training. That may involve two related brain scans: MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging), which produce three-dimensional views of the brain, and functional MRIs (fMRIs), which make a succession of live images that show changes in blood flow and oxygen consumption, indicating the activity of different regions of the brain, as the subjects engage in problem-solving.
She became interested in this field while working with Baruch psychology Associate Professor Jennifer Mangels, the principal investigator of the Dynamic Learning Lab, whose research focuses on the complex interactions of attention, learning and memory; Mangels approaches this topic from multiple perspectives that integrate social, cognitive and affective neuroscience. (Another 2012 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship winner, Jimena Santillan, also worked with Mangels.)
Guerra-Carrillo is generally interested in the way people learn and how work in neuroscience can be directly applied to education. This flowed out of her work tutoring fellow undergraduates and children in the psychiatric unit of Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens.
"Working with the children at the unit made me realize how much they could benefit from approachable training programs to strengthen basic cognitive and academic skills," she says. Her conceptual fascination grew as she attended talks at conferences about other types of cognitive training programs.
After graduation, she took two years off from school to manage Mangels' lab. "I was able to research full time and to help in many projects, seeing them through from beginning to end," she says. "Doctor Mangels is a great mentor."
She was paid through Mangels' grants from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Education's research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.
Guerra-Carrillo, 24, grew up in Quito, Ecuador, and moved to New York City when she was 17 to be with her brother. She went straight to Baruch. "I was fascinated with the city, having access to cultural events and museums – especially great food! One of the first things I noticed about Baruch was how diverse it was," she says. "In Ecuador, everyone comes from the same place. Here people are from different cultures, and that was very fascinating. I also found Baruch's professors really caring; if you showed interest in your classes, they were willing to talk with you after hours and to keep working with you as much as you wanted. That was really special."
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Jaeseung Hahn
Big Ideas on the Nano Level
As an undergraduate, Jaeseung Hahn (Macaulay Honors College at City College, BE in biomedical engineering, 2012) fabricated smart nanoparticles that could bind to cancer cells, enabling them to be seen via an imaging technique called immuno-surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy. In Raman spectroscopy, a laser shined on a substance generates a unique spectrum of photons, sort of the way a prism turns sunlight into a rainbow.
Heading to Harvard-MIT's joint doctoral program in medical engineering and medical physics with the support of a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, he intends to develop a "theranostic" nanoparticle – one that could be therapeutic and diagnostic.
The fellowship is the most prestigious award a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. Providing $126,000 over three years, it recognizes and supports exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields.
Medical nanotechnology is a growing area, with many researchers pursuing the goal of helping patients with excruciatingly small devices measuring just 1 to 100 nanometers, or billionths of a meter (by comparison, a human hair spans about 100,000 nanometers).
But Hahn may have a leg up on the competition, because he has already done unique research. In a remarkable achievement, he began work as a freshman with Assistant Professor Yuying Gosser, who directs student research and scholarship at City College's Grove School of Engineering. Supported by grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science Education Program and the National Science Foundation STEP initiative, she established the Pathways Bioinformatics Center and the Gateway Research Laboratory, which are dedicated to undergraduate research training.
Under her guidance and in collaboration with a professor in China, Hahn studied whether and how andrographolide (a bitter substance derived from a plant that's widely used for medicinal purposes in Asia) inhibits extracellular signaling proteins called ERK2 and JNK3. Gosser says that using specialized software, he "spent day and night to model the interface" of these proteins with andrographolide and determined that it did bind with ERK2, but not with JNK3. This resulted in a co-authored poster that was presented at the VIII European Symposium of the Protein Society in Zurich in 2009.
"This experience as a freshman really helped me realize my interest in science and prepare myself to pursue the career in research," Hahn says.
Utilizing the travel grant awarded to Macaulay students and with the support of DAAD RISE, an international program that supports undergraduate scientific research, he interned in the summer after his sophomore year at the University of Osnabrueck in Germany. Researchers there were seeking to use nanoparticles to diagnose cancer, and Hahn got interested in medical nanotechnology right away.
"I developed nanostars, star-shaped nanoparticles that were coated with Raman-active molecules," by adding silver nitrate to the growth phase of gold nanoparticles, he says. This made spherical nanoparticles branch into stars. "They had been synthesized before, but they were never biocompatible because they used toxic chemicals. I somehow was able to add biocompatibility."He taught German PhD students in the lab to use his process, "then I came back home. The German group published the article," giving him credit.
He applied to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where Gosser had conducted research. As a junior and senior, Hahn worked with researchers Daniel L.J. Thorek (bioengineering) and Jan Grimm (radiology), providing them with expertise in fabricating gold nanoparticles.
"For the past year, I have been trying to optimize the nanostars," he says. They could become "theranostic" devices, delivering drugs and helping to diagnose diseases. "In order for this technology to be translated to the clinical setting, first you have to be able to track and steer the nano-devices to the right place," Hahn says.
Tackling the first issue, Hahn found that star-shaped nanoparticles produced stronger signals under Raman spectroscopy than round ones. But if the nanoparticle is too branched or spiky, the Raman signal fades. "I created a library of them that are not so spiky. The ones that are in the middle, between round and spiky, give out the strongest signal. That's where I am now." Hahn is the lead author, with Thorek, Grimm and another researcher, of a paper about this, which is under revision for publication.
As for steering the nanoparticles to where they're needed, perhaps with an external magnetic field – that remains for future research. (Click on http://www.cuny.edu/about/people/students1/linamercedesgonzalez.html for a related larger-scale drug-delivery approach being researched by 2011 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship winner Lina Mercedes Gonzales.)
Hahn received a stipend that supported him during summer research and for conferences from COURT, the CCNY-Memorial Sloan-Kettering Continuum of Undergraduate Research Training.
Hahn was born in the United States to Korean parents and was raised in Korea. He spent time in Belgium as a middle- and high-school student before finishing high school in Ossining, N.Y. He then headed for CUNY.
Macaulay Honors College, he says, provides "great opportunity. I could not have done the research in Germany if I didn't have the $7,500 for an internship or study abroad." Meanwhile, City College's Grove School of Engineering "has a reputation for biomedical engineering."
"My Korean education gave me the discipline I have now, so I can be a hard worker and try my best when working in the lab," he says. "At the same time, in America, there is a freedom that's restricted in Korea, which allows people to excel."
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Kirk Haltaufderhyde
Skin-Deep Research
After rotating through several labs, looking for the best fit as he began his predoctoral research at Brown University, Kirk Haltaufderhyde (York College, BS in biotechnology, 2011) became intrigued with research that is probing the role of photoreceptors in the skin.
Now, he'll get to explore the implications of light sensitivity in skin cells with the support of a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This is the most prestigious award a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. This award recognizes and supports exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields. Providing $126,000 over three years, the grant recognizes and supports exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields.
Before his arrival, the laboratory of his mentor, Assistant Professor Elena Oancea, found that melanocyte skin cells – those in the epidermis that produce melanin, which affects skin color – detect ultraviolet light using a photosensitive receptor that formerly was thought to exist only in the eye. Oancea's team determined that the receptor rhodopsin lets skin protectively begin to tan within a couple of hours of exposure to UVA radiation, one of two types of ultraviolet light found in sunlight. Previously, melanin production was only known to occur days after exposure to the other ultraviolet type, UVB, had damaged DNA. Her lab is in Brown's Department of Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology and Biotechnology.
In a related finding, other scientists have found that photoreceptors in the skin help everyone – including blind people – keep normal, 24-hour cycles called circadian rhythms, such as awakening when the sun rises.
"This is really new, and it's exciting trying to figure out the mechanism of phototransduction outside of the eye," Haltaufderhyde says, referring to the bodily process that converts light into an electrical signal that's transmitted to the brain.
In the summer of 2010, he joined the lab of York Associate Professor Gerard McNeil, whose research focuses on the role of the RNA-binding protein Lark and its importance in early development; he uses the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model system.
Under his direction, Haltaufderhyde plunged into genomics research via the Genomics Education Partnership, a consortium of more than 50 colleges and universities that involves undergraduates in bioinformatics (using computers to study vast amounts of biological data, like genomes). He completed three original research projects on the genomes of Drosophila mojavensis and Drosophila grimshawi and is a coauthor on a manuscript that is in preparation.
Those projects, he says, involved the sequence improvement (finishing) and annotation of the gene-rich region of the fourth chromosome of several Drosophila species. This chromosome is thought to be mainly heterochromatic (consisting of tightly packed DNA). These results provide insight into gene structure, repeat types, densities and evolution in different species of this form of chromatin (the complex of DNA and proteins in the cell nucleus that is essential for maintaining chromosome structure).
"Working from an already well characterized D. melanogaster genome, we can use computer software to perform a comparative analysis of DNA sequences from other Drosophila species to detect genes of common ancestry," he says. "These are called orthologous genes."
Haltaufderhyde says that he "went to York because I was able to get close interaction with all the professors, and you might not get that at other institutions. To have the research experience with Doctor McNeil was definitely a turning point."
As an undergraduate, he was supported by a CUNY Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation grant. He graduated from York summa cum laude.
He is enjoying the change of scene in Providence, R.I. He adds that he's working toward a PhD "to discover something no one else knows."
What could be a bigger challenge than that?
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Jemila Kester
Unraveling the Mysteries of TB
Jemila Caplan Kester (City College, BS in biology, summa cum laude 2010) enrolled at Harvard University's School of Public Health hoping to accomplish two things: "First, to work on a globally relevant pathogen and, second, to do really cool biology."
Reaching those twin goals – with tuberculosis in her sights – has become easier, thanks to a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This is the most prestigious award a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. Providing $126,000 over three years, it recognizes and supports exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields.
Kester is intrigued by the astounding estimate that a third of the world's population is infected with latent tuberculosis, which is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis."They're infected, but they're not sick. At any time, the disease could be reactivated, and they could become sick and contagious," she says.
"My project is to understand how two people can be infected with TB – one dies and one lives with it for 50 years and never gets sick or gives it to anyone else. I'm looking at this diversity from the single-cell level, to try to see why two bacteria, which technically are genetically identical, don't behave the same."
The bacterium that causes human tuberculosis is part of a large family called Mycobacteria. Mycobacterial cells have poles – Kester likens it to a banana having one end with a stem and one end without – and when they divide, the new cell grows from one pole and not the other. If division is asymmetric, the materials in the mother cells are not equally distributed to the daughters; proteins, membrane compartments and other components can be differentially distributed. This results in variation among individuals (the phenotype) that is not related to DNA (the genotype). In this way, a clonal population of nearly identical cells could become phenotypically diverse, creating different disease states between people – and even within the same person.
But what's the mechanism that makes asymmetry occur? She thought that a key might lie in the work of Lucy Shapiro (Brooklyn College, AB cum laude, 1962), a Stanford University professor of developmental biology and director of Stanford's Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine. "Her work on how a different bacterium establishes asymmetry pointed me in the direction of Clp protease, an enzyme that chews up other proteins involved in establishing polarity. I thought, 'Maybe Clp is involved here, too.' And it was!"
Now in her first year at Harvard, she's working in the laboratory of Sarah Fortune, who looks at how M. tuberculosis uses specialized secretion systems and surface structures to mediate interactions with the infected host.
Kester is studying certain proteins of a nonpathogenic relative of TB that behaves similarly to the infectious one but grows faster. She tinkers with substances in the cells, adding things or subtracting them. "I make movies of my cells to see what happens and do a lot of quantitative microscopy of single cells," she says.
She says there's more to her research than the search for knowledge. "I really care about lessening disparities between the more economically privileged countries in the West and those in the Third World and even within our own country. Living in New York City for 11 years, I saw differences between affluent and poor areas. I worked in a Harlem drug rehab program and at a top Midtown company – the whole spectrum. I want to know my research will impact the world."
When she studied at City College, Kester earned several honors. A National Institutes of Health Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) Fellowship paid for a stipend, tuition and other costs. "You're working in a lab and don't have to have another job to support yourself," she says. "I consider myself a typical CCNY student. I don't think I knew anybody there where money wasn't a problem. The MARC Fellowship relieved that pressure. You can concentrate on your research, and that's what gets you into Harvard."
Kester was selected as the 2006-07 Sharon Cosloy Scholar for her research with biology Professor Shubha Govind's lab on the role of a member of the Notch signaling pathway, "neuralized," in blood cell development, using the fly as a model. This City College Biology Department award of up to $2,000 is given to an outstanding student with an interest in cellular or molecular biology or microbial genetics.
Later, she worked in Johanna Joyce's lab at the Sloan-Kettering Institute. Funded by MARC and a sister federal program, RISE, Kester studied the interaction of macrophages, which are sentinels of the immune system, with cancer cells in mitigating the effectiveness of clinically relevant chemotherapies. The Joyce lab determined that macrophage-derived proteases (proteins that break down other proteins) can contribute to treatment failure in a mouse model of breast cancer.
She received other grants at City College: the Piel Award, the Josh and Judy Weston Scholarship, the Paul Krupa Award for Excellence in Research for her senior thesis defense. And she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute-Pathways Investigator in Govind's lab.
As a rising senior in 2006, Kester won an NIH Fogarty International Center-MIRT (Minority International Research Training) grant, which sent her to Israel to work with Bedouin women to promote basic health care and their rights as Israeli citizens. "They have the right to health care and should get mammograms and Pap smears and testing for STDs," she says. "I organized a team with a social worker, a family-practice MD and a pediatrician to bring this group of marginalized Israeli citizens the health care they were morally and legally entitled."
Her work in Israel led to a heart-to-heart conversation with Govind, her City College mentor, about her original intention to pursue an MD/PhD program. "I was moved by the experience, but as amazing as it was, I realized my heart wasn't in medicine: I wanted to be at the bench. I love bench work, because it allows me to have a broader impact."
The 33-year-old Kester says she took some years off after high school before starting college at Hunter and then transferring to City. "I took my time graduating because I had two kids [now 4½ and 1½] in the middle," she says. "I did some modeling, worked at McKinsey [& Co., a global management consulting firm] as an IT analyst and then went back to school. So I went from modeling to model organisms."
What will she do after she finishes the National Science Foundation fellowship and earns her doctorate? She laughs. "The fellowship is a three-year grant, but I've started on what will be a 20-year project. I certainly hope to find the questions that we need to ask in three years, but answering them will take a lot more time."
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David Bahr
David Bahr, who overcame personal adversity to earn a PhD in English from the Graduate Center in 2012, has accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Born to a single mother battling mental illness, Bahr became a ward of the state and was placed in foster care when he was 2. During his unsettled childhood, he was reclaimed by his mother and briefly left in a children's psychiatric ward before being transferred to a custodial boarding school then returned to his foster family, where he remained until he "aged out" of the system at 18.
Bahr put himself through Hunter and the Graduate Center while working as a temp and adjunct instructor. "I loved graduate school," he says, "yet I frequently felt discouraged about my possibilities of 'breaking through' as an employable professional."
He left after finishing his coursework and turned to journalism, writing for The New York Times, GQ, The Advocate, Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly and New York magazine. He received fellowships, from Yaddo and the Albee Foundation, and began to write and publish autobiographical essays and fiction.
When he returned to the Graduate Center to explore his interests in autobiography and affect, he was awarded a writing fellowship at BMCC, participated in the Mellon Foundation seminar on "Emotion" and continued to teach.
"Considering my personal trajectory," he says, "I am particularly happy about getting a job at BMCC, where I can help others striving to make something of themselves."
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Ananda Cohen
Ananda Cohen, who will graduate with a Ph.D. in art history in May 2012, accepted a tenure-track position at Cornell University, beginning in the fall, as assistant professor of colonial Latin American visual culture in the history of art department.
Her dissertation, "Mural Painting and Social Change in the Colonial Andes, 1626–1830," focuses on the social history of mural painting in highland Peru from the mid-colonial period to the early years of independence and examines how artists modified religious images to resonate with local indigenous communities. It offers new insight into indigenous-European artistic and cultural exchange in colonial Latin America.
At Cornell, Cohen will teach courses in pre-Columbian and colonial Latin American art and architecture. Among her publications are, co-authored with Jeremy James George, Handbook to Life in the Inca World (Facts on File, 2011); chapters on "Pre-Columbian Art of the Andes" and "Art in the Viceroyalty of Peru" in Maya Jiménez, Latin American Art (Pearson, forthcoming 2013); essays on "Early Textile Traditions of South Coastal Peru" and "Featherwork of Ancient Peru" in Natural and Supernatural: Andean Textiles and Material Culture, exhibition catalog, Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, 2009; and book reviews in The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology and Ethnohistory.
Among the awards she received during her graduate studies were a 2010–11 CUNY Graduate Center Sponsored Dissertation Fellowship; a 2010 Helen Watson Buckner Memorial Fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library; and a 2005–07 CUNY Graduate Center Dean K. Harrison Award.
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Linell Ajello
Linell Ajello graduated in May with a Ph.D. in theatre and has accepted a two-year Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in the communications department of Tulane University.
For her dissertation, "Tragic Practice: Participatory Democracy and Activist Theatre in the U.S., 2000–10," Ajello studied how the performances of four activist groups engaged in democratic communication and connected scholarship on deliberative democracy with scholarship on tragedy. The groups included Iraq Veterans Against the War, Invisible Children, and Community Action Association, which hosts Poverty Simulations, a role-playing theatre game.
In her coursework in theatre and political science, she developed her interest in analyzing theatre as political engagement and in performance as a vital form of expression within a democratic republic. During her postdoctoral fellowship at Tulane, Ajello will study current representations — newspaper photos, movies, TV, theatre — of poverty in New Orleans and compare them to presidential and popular discourse about poverty. She also will teach one course per semester on democracy and performance.
During her graduate studies, Ajello held three fellowships that provided her time to research and write: a two-year Writing Fellowship as well as, currently, a Communication Fellowship, both at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College; and a Graduate Center Dissertation Fellowship.
Her publications include "A Game of Poverty and Tragic Deliberation," Constellations: An International Journal of Democracy and Critical Theory (forthcoming) and "Profile: 'Sekou Sundiata: Poet and Performer, 1948–2007,'" Ecumenica Journal of Theatre and Performance 3:2 (2010).
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Sari Altschuler
Sari Altschuler (English) defended her dissertation in April and has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of South Florida in fall 2012.
Her dissertation, "National Physiology: Literature, Medicine, and the Invention of the American Body, 1789–1860," explores the collaborative relationship between medicine and literature in the early republic, offering the first genealogy of the medical humanities in America.
In her first year as professor of English at USF, she will teach American literature to 1865, 19th-century American fiction and a doctoral-level course.
Altschuler's work has appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly and the Journal of the Early Republic. The high standard of Altschuler's research and writing has been recognized outside the CUNY system by awards and/or dissertation fellowships from the University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies; the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science; the American Antiquarian Society; the University of Virginia; the Library Company of Philadelphia; the Society of Early Americanists; and the Charles Brockden Brown Society.
Altschuler serves on the Modern Language Association's delegate assembly, the American Studies Association Early American Caucus working committee, the Charles Brockden Brown Society board and the working group for the Future of Disability Studies Project.
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Oluwadamisi (Kay) Atanda
Oluwadamisi "Kay" Atanda (Queensborough Community College, A.A. in liberal arts and sciences, 2012) won membership on the prestigious First Team of the Phi Theta Kappa All-New York Academic Team and is a 2012 Coca-Cola Community College Academic Team Silver Scholar.
The Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation sponsors the program by recognizing 50 Gold, 50 Silver and 50 Bronze Scholars and providing more than $180,000 in scholarships annually. The international honor society Phi Theta Kappa administers the program and recognizes the scholars during ceremonies nationwide.
Atanda received a $1,250 scholarship and a medallion.
"To be chosen from a pool of so many deserving students is a humbling and exciting experience," says Atanda. "I am inspired to set my academic and career goals even higher."
Atanda was student body president at his high school in Lagos, Nigeria, where he was raised. He moved to the United States in 2010 in pursuit of quality higher education. A liberal arts major, Atanda was named to the 2011 Dean's List and is a member of Phi Theta Kappa. He was president of Queensborough's Student Government Association and was a member of the Mock Trial Team. His community involvement includes interning for New York State Assemb. David Weprin in 2011.
Upon receiving his associate degree from Queensborough, Atanda plans to continue his studies in political science and international relations at a four-year college. He aspires to become secretary-general of the United Nations.
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Adele Kudish
Adele Kudish, who earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature and was student speaker at the Graduate Center's 2012 commencement, accepted a tenure-track job in the English department at Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she will teach composition and literature.
In her dissertation, "Double-Dealings and Double Meanings: Doubting and Knowing in European 'Analytical' Fiction," she examined the way authors represent consciousness — in particular, doubt, error and obsessive love — in works written well before Freudian psychoanalysis and the discipline of psychology were established in the late 19th century.
During 2011–12, Kudish received a Sponsored Dissertation Fellowship and the Renaissance Studies Certificate Program's Travel and Research Grant. In Spring 2012, she was invited to present three papers: "Adapting the Novels of Madame de Lafayette" at the American Comparative Literature Association's annual conference; "Double-Dealings and Double Meanings: Deliberation and Dissimulation in La Princesse de Clèves" for the Graduate Center's Renaissance Studies Certificate Program's colloquium series; and "Intimacy and Dissimulation in Marguerite de Navarre's Tenth Nouvelle" for a graduate seminar on "Fictions of the Psyche."
She is working on an article on Samuel Richardson's last novel, tentatively titled "Avoiding the Chimera: Anti-Romance in the History of Sir Charles Grandison."
During her graduate studies, Kudish taught English composition, English literature, comparative literature and French language at various CUNY colleges; served as a 2009–11 BMCC writing Fellow; and, in 2009–11, as adjunct instructor for European humanities courses in the Morse Academic Plan at New York University.
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Stephen Ma
Looking for an Unbreakable Breakthrough
Plastics. Strong and versatile, these products are the backbone, heart and lungs of countless devices that make our modern world function. But when these marvels of covalently bonded polymers break, for the most part they're finished. Wouldn't it be great if they could be made self-healing? And wouldn't it be better still if you could repair breaks – even stress fractures too small to be seen with the naked eye – just by shining a light on them?
"That's the eventual project I'm heading toward," says Stephen Ma (Macaulay Honors College at City College, BS in chemical engineering, 2011). Now at the University of Delaware, he hopes to reach that goal through reversible polymer bond structures called covalent adaptable networks (CANs); he'll do that by using thiol-ene chemistry, which mixes sulfur-based compounds with alkenes. (The most famous example of this process is using sulfur to vulcanize rubber, which makes it less sticky, more stable and more elastic.)
Ma will be supported in his doctoral research by a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the most prestigious award a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. Providing $126,000 over three years, these grants recognize and support exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields.
For the moment, however, Ma is tackling a related project as he works toward his qualifying exams at Delaware: developing pressure-sensitive adhesives that would be reusable because they're self-cleaning and ultra-strong. In this, he's inspired by a gecko's dry feet, which allow the reptile to climb up glass without leaving a sticky residue. "This project is connected with my self-healing materials project in that I will use the same CANs and thiol-ene chemistry," he says.
This diversity of endeavor reflects the range of research that Ma has undertaken.
As a sophomore at City College, he started doing research with Associate Professor Ilona Kretzschmar and a graduate student, Sonia Mathew, on a project to improve the efficiency of dye-sensitized solar cells.
The next summer he went to Jilin University in Changchun, China, to study Raman spectroscopy of man-sized semiconductor particles. That resulted in a paper published by the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters; he was the lead author, along with then-doctoral candidate Richard Livingstone (City College PhD in chemistry, 2010), City College chemistry Professor John R. Lombardi and a Chinese professor, Bing Zhao.
That 10-week trip to China was financed by the National Science Foundation's International Research and Education in Engineering initiative, or IREE, and was organized by Purdue University. But he also took separate trips to China and to Japan through Macaulay's Opportunities Fund, which covers the cost of international travel and study.
"My thinking was that as a researcher I'd eventually want to collaborate with scientists from those countries, so it would help to know about their cultures," he says. Ma was born in New York, but his father is from Taiwan and his mother from Hong Kong; he speaks Chinese conversationally, "which allowed me to connect with students while doing research."
Ma is enthusiastic about his undergraduate experience. "The people at the City Honors Program were very helpful in applying for scholarships and fellowships, and the City engineering department is amazing and very open to students doing research. Before I met Doctor Kretzschmar, I had a vague idea of what research was, but she's a terrific mentor, who takes time to talk and give advice."
Macaulay Honors College, he adds, "definitely gave me more opportunities than I could have gotten at any other school, especially the advisement."
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Carolina Salguero
Taking the H (Harm) Out of HIV
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a single strand of trouble. A bundle of viral RNA invades host cells, hijacks the cells' machinery to copy itself and assembles new viral particles to invade other cells. Left unchecked, HIV is a death sentence. Drugs can prevent it from developing into full-blown AIDS, but the virus survives, ever waiting for the chance to emerge and wreak havoc.
Carolina Salguero (Hunter College, BA in biochemistry, minor in economics, 2011), now a doctoral student in molecular and cell biology at Harvard University, sees a way to render HIV harmless..
The virus has only nine genes (compared to more than 500 in a bacterium and more than 20,000 in a human). Three of them – named gag, pol and env – make proteins involved in infrastructure and replication of new viral particles; the other six code for proteins that control HIV's ability to infect a cell and enhance replication.
When two of the genes, gag and pol, are not translated in the proper ratio – that is, when the production of proteins coded by those genes is knocked awry – the assembly, replication and infectivity of new viral particles are impaired.
The National Science Foundation has granted Salguero a 2012 Graduate Research Fellowship to explore this approach at neutering HIV. She will undertake structural and functional studies to reveal the mechanisms by which retroviruses, like HIV, use three-dimensional RNA as a regulatory structure that maintains the correct ratio of gag and pol.
"I hope this approach will lead to a breakthrough," she says. Salguero has support not only from the National Science Foundation – whose $126,000 grant over three years is the most prestigious award a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can win – but also from Merck, the pharmaceutical giant. "They see the potential in our research," she says.
Salguero took the long road to get to the lab. When she was 12, living in her native Bogotá, Colombia, she read about how the Human Genome Project would unlock the basic mechanism behind the human species, and she longed to take part in that quest. By the time she finished a public technical high school, the human genome had been decoded, but her interest in math, chemistry and biology had only grown. "I knew this was the field I wanted to be in," she says.
When she graduated at 16, her parents sent her to the United States to study. "My father was unable to attend high school because he was obligated to work to help support his family since the age of 9," Salguero says. Although he could not pay to educate his eight children, "he relentlessly encouraged us to pursue a college education."
It took her 11 years to finish her undergraduate degree because she needed to work full time to support herself. "Because I paid for my own college education, I always made an effort to maximize my learning experience," she says. She earned an associate degree in California, managed a college preparation center in Miami and worked as a private tutor for K-12 students in New York City in topics ranging from algebra to chemistry to personal finance.
Her baccalaureate training set her on the path to the doctoral work she is undertaking at Harvard. She started at Hunter College in 2008 and got into laboratory research with the support of federally funded programs like Minority Access to Research Careers, Minority Biomedical Research Support and the Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement. This led to three years of lab work at Hunter.
For two years, she worked with chemistry Associate Professor Akira Kawamura, assisting in a graduate student's research. In one self-contained project, she used a photoactive probe to selectively label and separate adenine-binding proteins from a complex protein mixture. Kawamura's lab uses "photoaffinity-labeling" to find targets for therapeutic drugs. "Identification of new proteins targeted by small molecules is important because it opens up new opportunities for therapeutic intervention of various diseases using small molecules," his website says.
Salguero says that this research developed her critical-thinking skills, honed her basic laboratory skills and got her fascinated with proteomics (the study of expressed proteins under defined conditions), "especially in the intrinsic relationship of protein structure and function."
In her last year at Hunter, Salguero also worked with structural biology Professor Nancy Greenbaum, an expert in RNA, investigating the features of an RNA loop structure that forms prior to gene splicing. "Working with Doctor Greenbaum, I was able to appreciate that answering biochemical and biophysical questions not only requires the analysis of the nature and structure of the molecules involved, but it also involves a deep analysis of the dynamics and energetics of chemical and biological interactions," she says.
Salguero is a CUNY Jonas E. Salk Scholar, and she was the first Hunter student to receive the Rosalyn Yalow Achievement in Science Award. She also had two significant summer internships. In 2009, she was at Harvard, where she used nuclear magnetic resonance to solve the structure of the RNA that regulates the gag and pol ratio in Murine Leukemia Virus (MLV). She conducted experiments of mutant constructs, which helped demonstrate that regulation of the gag and pol ratio in MLV requires a change in the shape of the regulatory RNA. This led to a third-authorship on a paper.
Her other summer internship was at Yale, where she purified the human blue pigment opsin, one of the photoreceptors responsible for color vision, using nanoscale lipid disks. She continued working to purify the blue opsin on weekends during the fall semester while she was taking classes and working in a lab at Hunter. Her work at Yale led to a first-authorship on a manuscript that is in preparation.
Although completion of her doctoral research is perhaps four years away, Salguero is considering education beyond that – perhaps a master's in public health, which would enable her to better combine her knowledge of the molecular basis of infectious diseases with real-world implications for underprivileged populations.
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Jimena Santillan
Paying Attention
Next time you're in a crowded restaurant, notice how you are able to choose to focus only on your dinner companion's banter and ignore the chatter of the couple to your left or the waiter taking an order to your right. Blotting out everything that's irrelevant is called selective attention, and most of us can do it without having to think about it.
What happens in the brain's neurons that allow this to happen? And can anything – such as bilingualism – enhance this ability?
Jimena Santillan (Hunter, B.A. in psychology 2012) will explore that possibility in a doctoral program at the University of Oregon with a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This is the most prestigious award a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. Providing $126,000 over three years, the grant recognizes and supports exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields.
"I'm from Mexico, where I went to an English-immersion school," she says. "I started learning this second language when I was very young, and that helped a lot. I want to see whether bilingualism plays a role in the development of selective attention. Bilingual children have to inhibit one language to speak the other, so they're constantly practicing this skill. Perhaps that translates into an advantage in being able to better focus their attention in other domains."
Research shows that children of lower socioeconomic status are not as good at selective attention as those who are wealthier, but that finding has an unusual twist in this country when a second language is introduced. In most parts of the world, "bilingualism is associated with people who have higher incomes and access to more education," Santillan says. "But in the United States, bilingual children tend to come from families that have migrated from other countries and are from lower socioeconomic status."
She hypothesizes that looking at how the brain responds to stimuli will show that bilingual children will be better at selective attention, and that children from lower socioeconomic status will benefit from an intervention designed to enhance this neurocognitive ability.
"I'll be training children from Head Start programs, who are living below the poverty line, to develop their neurocognitive ability for selective attention, because this ability has been shown to predict academic success."
She will work in Oregon's Brain Development Lab, where psychology and neuroscience Professor Helen Neville has received a grant to translate this intervention into Spanish, allowing Santillan to work with Latino children.
"She wants to use science as a tool to reduce social inequality," Santillan says. "She's pushing for developing research-based education programs and interventions, which is very much in line with my interest in having a social impact through science."
To measure whether bilingualism and selective attention training have an impact at the brain level, she will use electroencephalography, which is the recording of electrical activity via an array of voltage sensors on the scalp. These sensitive sensors can pick up the firing of neurons, measuring whether changes occur in the brain.
Santillan came to New York City, a grandmother's hometown, because she wanted to study abroad. After a freshman year at Pace University, she transferred to Hunter, where she was attracted by well-funded research programs designed to prepare minority students for careers in research.
She was accepted into the Thomas Hunter Honors Program and, in her junior year, became a NIMH COR scholar, a National Institute of Mental Health program that trains underrepresented students in psychology research.
As a senior, she was a BP-ENDURE program scholar. This diversity program, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is a partnership between Hunter College and New York, Brown and Vanderbilt Universities and the University of Michigan. Aimed at preparing undergraduates for doctoral research careers, it provides intensive training in neuroscience, research mentors, specialized neuroscience courses and summer research experience. That led her to a Research Experiences for Undergraduates summer internship at Vanderbilt University's Educational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, where she examined the development of native language expertise.
Other undergraduate research included working as an assistant in Hunter's Language and Conceptual Development Lab under the mentorship of Associate Professor Sandeep Prasada. Her main project looked at the role of linguistic cues in the acquisition of generic knowledge (knowledge concerning kinds/categories of things and their properties) about novel objects in adults and children.
In addition, she assisted in Associate Professor Jennifer Mangels' Dynamic Learning lab at Baruch College, helping with a project that examined the relationship between rumination and attention allocation during the processing of learning-relevant information. (Another 2012 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship winner, Carolina Guerra-Carillo, also worked with Mangels.)
She also was part of the Summer Research Opportunity Program at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, where she worked on a project looking at children's conceptions of free will.
Santillan says that Hunter prepared her well for doctoral work and helped confirm that research is "the path I want to follow."
"Having the chance to be exposed to the scientific method from different angles and at various stages in my career has provided me with the training and experience necessary to thoroughly comprehend what conducting research entails," she wrote in an essay submitted for the National Science Foundation grant. "It has enabled me to be actively engaged in multiple stages of the research process.
"I want to contribute to change. I strongly believe that with the privilege of a higher education comes the responsibility to use it to give back to the community, particularly on behalf of those that have not had such opportunities. I want to make my own contribution through science by using a research-based approach to strive to remedy one of the most pressing issues society faces today: educational disparities."
By better understanding how environmental factors influence cognitive development at the brain level, Santillan wrote, she hopes to find ways to assure that students "develop the neurocognitive abilities they will need to succeed academically and in the future." This will help "alleviate the detrimental consequences that the achievement gap brings to individuals and to society as a whole."
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Audrey Manalang
Speaking Out
Burbank, Calif. resident Audrey Manalang always dreamed of living in New York City. An Internet search for speech pathology programs led her to the Macaulay Honors College at Lehman.
About to graduate with a 2012 bachelor's degree in that field, Manalang plans to make New York City her home a little longer. This fall, she begins studying for a master's in speech pathology at Columbia University with the help of a scholarship from that university.
Born in Batangas City, the Philippines, Manalang moved to the United States with her parents when she was 15. Her parents, physicians in their home country, supported her decision to travel across the country for college. "My parents would travel to communities that didn't have access to hospitals," she says. "I would like to go back home and do some volunteer work when I finish."
Manalang applied to 10 colleges and was accepted to all but one. Lehman, however, was the obvious choice for her. "The campus was really beautiful," she says, "and I didn't have to pay out-of-state tuition. The Macaulay Honors College was just a great opportunity. It was going to help me really learn and expose me to a lot of new things because I would be interacting with other CUNY students."
As coordinator of the college's Wellness Education and Promotion Program, as well as the secretary and webmaster for the Golden Key Honor Society, Manalang has taken full advantage of campus life. She also recently joined Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology, and is a member of the Tobacco-Free Implementation Committee on campus. Living in the nearby brownstone Lehman leases to provide student housing made the college feel less like a commuter campus. Now she lives near campus in an apartment she shares with two other Macaulay students.
Manalang will receive about $7,000 in scholarship money, plus $6,000 in work-study funds from Columbia for her graduate degree. She hopes to work with children and is interested in the study of Specific Language Impairment, a condition that delays children's mastery of language skills although they exhibit no hearing loss or other developmental delays.
Lehman's clinic provided a great opportunity to see first-hand how speech pathologists work with clients, she says. She also appreciated the accessibility of faculty, staff and administrators.
What Manalang loves most about her field is the ability to help others. "It's amazing to watch their progress and know that you're making a difference and helping people to express themselves," she says.
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Larisa Ka
Larisa Kamga learned early that drugs could kill. She grew up in Cameroon, where counterfeit pharmaceuticals are rife and the medical system, she says, is broken.
"If you get sick, you don't go to the doctor. Your mom or grandma treats you," says Kamga, a graduating senior at The City College of New York.
Well-meaning relatives buy what they can afford – often bogus drugs laced with suspect ingredients. "I knew a friend who died from counterfeit medicine. That's really why I chose pharmacology," she says. "I wanted to go back and help people."
This spring, Kamga graduates with a BS in biochemistry, a 3.837 GPA and extensive disease research under her belt. She will go on to the University of Massachusetts Medical School for a PhD in pharmacology.
When she arrived in New York as a high school sophomore, Kamga hardly understood English in class. "I was like a dog in front of the TV," she says, smiling. Soon, however, she was editing classmates' essays. She excelled at math and science and was salutatorian of her high school class.
Majoring in biochemistry combined Kamga's love for chemistry and interest in medicine. Research opportunities brought her passion to life. Since 2009, she has helped her mentor, Professor of Chemistry Mark Steinberg, identify DNA biomarkers that herald the onset of cancer. Last summer at Stony Brook University, she studied how the tuberculosis pathogen flips a genetic switch to go from dormancy to infectious disease.
Kamga made the Dean's List in 2009 and has received Vallone and Susan Scher Kogan Scholarships. She will decide later whether to pursue cancer or infectious disease research, but she already plans to return to Cameroon to help change the system.
"I want to go back to be a professor, to expose students to research and study diseases that affect us," she says. "I didn't know what I wanted to do when I came here, but City College really prepared me to follow my dreams."
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Sophie Knowles
In Finland, Sophie Knowles (Brooklyn College, M.S. 2010), will learn about education policies and practices through master-level studies, classroom observations in English-speaking schools and extracurricular program research. Her inquiry will focus on the policies that support mathematics achievement and create an equitable learning environment. She will conduct surveys, complete case studies and observe schools that adhere to the Finnish National Curriculum.
At the University of Jyväskylä, Knowles plans to pursue a master's degree in educational leadership. This degree covers educational reform, research methods and leadership training. She is also applying for the master's degree program in education and globalization at the University of Oulu and, as a non-degree-seeking student, in the University of Helsinki's education department.
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Catherine Chan
Catherine Chan is a senior in the BA-MD program and Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College. She is majoring in biology with a minor in anthropology. Her overall GPA, after seven semesters, is an outstanding 3.918.
Chan completed her required 320 hours of summer clinical experience at New York Methodist Hospital, where she rotated through cardio-thoracic surgery, radiation oncology, pediatrics and emergency medicine. For her community service, Chan volunteered for two semesters at the Infant and Child Learning Center, affiliated with SUNY Downstate, where she worked with children, ages 1 to 5, who had developmental issues. The goal was to foster their growth in a day-care setting. Chan works with Professor Luis Quadri conducting research on Mycobacterium marinum, using this as a model system for the study of Mycobacterium tuberculosis pathogenesis. She also assists lab members in their projects and trains new members.
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Charlesworth Mabheka
"'Kill that sell-out!' a voice barked into the summer night. The headlights of the Land Rover blinded me. I was handcuffed, feet and hands. 'You are MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) supporters, and you're going to die!' shouted President Robert Mugabe's War Veterans. I was serving as an election monitor, having been involved in elections since 1994. They took me roughly by the arm and hustled me to the Land Rover, punched me in my side and shoved me onto the floor of the rear seat. After the 2002 election, and fearing for my life, I abandoned my ambitions of building a national grass-roots pro-democracy network in Zimbabwe and fled to the United States to pursue my education and join the democracy movement that has its deepest roots in the United States. Then, as if this was not enough, on Jan. 23, 2009, a cholera epidemic swept across Zimbabwe, killing 4,293 people, including my mother, aged 62, my 18-year-old sister and my 11-year-old nephew. I was devastated. I was angry with economic sanctions and Mugabe, who is responsible for the breakdown in the rule of law and collapse of the health-care system."
Charlesworth Mabheka transformed his anger into a college degree. His ultimate goal is to continue to support his countrymen, something he does from the United States via his involvement in volunteer work with One To World (formerly Metro International).
Mabheka has advocated for poverty eradication at U.N. Secretariat briefings and raised public awareness about world problems such as human trafficking through public forums at the Student World Assembly. He founded the Student World Assembly chapter at City College and served as its first president. In 2005 and 2006, he participated in the prestigious Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Conference and the Student Conference on United States Affairs, where his round table discussed Zimbabwe as a case study. Additionally, he planned and organized a seminar on "Responsibility to Protect After Libya" at City College, and was a delegate to the 57th Annual Student Conference on United States Affairs.
His research interests include poverty, HIV/AIDS and international sanctions. He presented "The Impact of Economic Sanctions: The Case of Zimbabwe and The Land Question in Zimbabwe: The Lingering Colonial Effect" at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in 2011, papers that were the result of his participation in Macaulay Honors Research Seminars.
He has worked as a research assistant with his mentor, Professor John Krinsky, as a social sciences tutor at Borough of Manhattan Community College and as a research intern for New York State Assemb. William Scarborough, and he is a volunteer with the International Rescue Committee. In spring 2012, he worked closely with Professor Nicholas Freudenberg on the CUNY symposium "Obesity and Social Justice." Mabheka started his CUNY education at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in 2004, earning an associate's degree in business administration in 2008. He hopes to go on for a master's degree in international relations at City College.
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Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson
Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson was recommended to the CUNY BA by Hunter English Professor Maryam Bakht, who was impressed with her ability to distinguish herself in upper-division linguistics classes and her early interest in conducting sociolinguistic research.
Seeking more than a traditional linguistics major, Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson (CUNY BA, with Hunter as her home school, 2012) designed an individualized curriculum in Language, Culture and Society to understand the relationship between language and social constructs. She drew from linguistically relevant courses from departments at the undergraduate and graduate level, including English, Spanish, anthropology and linguistics (at Hunter, City College and The Graduate Center).
In addition to her coursework, she was active in linguistic activities and research, from founding and serving as president of the Hunter Linguistics Club and co-coordinating HULLS, the Hunter Undergrad Linguistics and Language Studies Conference, to collaborating on research with Hunter College anthropology Professor Ignasi Clemente on his conversation analysis of children-doctor interaction in pediatric clinics, and with Bakht on a sociolinguistic investigation of the reality TV show Jersey Shore. The research with Bakht led to conference presentations, including one on the use of terms of reference in the performance of gendered/ethnic styles, and a presentation with Bakht and Hunter College anthropology Professor Marcos Rohena-Madrazoon on metalinguistics and stereotype in Jersey Shore at the 39th New Ways of Analyzing Variation Conference (Texas, 2010).
Valentinsson's research agenda has been influenced by her work with Bakht and has focused on the linguistic negotiation of celebrity identity through mass communication. She has presented papers on this topic at the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics and CUNY BMCC's Language, Culture and Society conference, focusing on the discursive strategies used by Lady Gaga to construct a relationship with her fans in mass-media interviews and through Twitter.
"My recent coursework on Spanish linguistics, as well as my past experiences in a Spanish-immersion elementary school and studying abroad for a year in Argentina, have expanded my research interest in this area in new ways," she says. "My future research goal is to explore how linguistic variation in Spanish is used in the mass media to construct identity."
She cites being chosen for a fellowship to attend the Linguistic Society of America's Summer Institute as among her most important activities. This program, held every other summer, is where the top scholars across linguistic sub-fields gather to teach classes in state-of-the-art subjects as well as foundational courses.
"Being a CUNY BA student was very important in helping me get that fellowship: Since few CUNY colleges offer a rigorous linguistics major, I was able to show the committee through my area that I was serious about becoming a well-rounded linguist and that I had interests across the various sub-disciplines.
Valentinsson, a member of the American Anthropological Association, American Dialect Society and Linguistic Society of America, was accepted with significant funding to the M.A./Ph.D. program in linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh and the joint PhD program in anthropology and linguistics at the University of Arizona. She will attend Arizona in the fall.
"I've benefited so much from such amazing experiences, both academically and personally, in CUNY BA that my ultimate professional goal after completing my PhD is to return to New York to continue my research and to teach at CUNY."
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Jennifer Corns
Jennifer Corns, a December 2011 graduate of the PhD program in philosophy and holder of a 2011–12 Five-College Dissertation Fellowship at Mount Holyoke College, has been serving since February as postdoctoral research fellow with the Pain Project at the University of Glasgow.
Corns received honors for the defense of her dissertation, "Pain Is Not a Natural Kind," that was written under the supervision of Distinguished Professor Jesse Prinz.
"Reading case studies of pain asymbolics was one of the things that piqued my interest," she says. "They seem to experience pain without being bothered by it."
In her dissertation, bringing philosophical inquiries and contemporary pain research to bear, she argued that while pains exist and are useful for categorizing daily experience, they are not a proper scientific category. Corns has presented papers on the philosophy of mind and language and ethics and has a broad interest in how common, everyday categories — like belief, love, pleasure and humor — are employed for ethical and scientific inquiry.
Author of "When Is a Reason Properly Pragmatic," Consciousness and Cognition (2011), she is preparing a book proposal and articles on pain, bioethics and folk-psychological explanation. The Pain Project, comprising philosophers, neuroscientists and veterinarians from around the world, focuses on the relations between pain, perception and emotion as well as pain in animals. Corns is working with other experts as she continues to develop her own research on pain in hopes of contributing to an improvement in treatment and the alleviation of unnecessary suffering.
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Elizabeth Alsop
Elizabeth Alsop, a PhD candidate in comparative literature and the film studies certificate program at The Graduate Center, is completing her dissertation, "Making Conversation: The Poetics of Voice in Modernist Fiction," and expects to graduate in October. She has a BA from Brown University and is an alumna of the Writers' Institute at The Graduate Center.
In fall 2012, she will begin a tenure-track appointment as an assistant professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. She will teach upper-level and general education literature and writing classes as well as courses in the department's new film major.
Her research interests include the 20th-century American, British and Italian novel, modernism, film studies, and narrative theory. Her article, "Refusal To Tell: Withholding Heroines in Hawthorne, Wharton, and Coetzee," is forthcoming in College Literature, and her essay on contemporary Italian novelist Elena Ferrante will be published in Italica in 2013.
Her essays and reviews have also appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Bookforum and KinoKultura. For the past year, she has been an instructional technology fellow at New York City College of Technology, where she has helped train students and faculty to use OpenLab, the college's new digital platform for teaching and learning. Previously, she was a writing fellow at York College and taught courses in literature, writing and film at Queens College and Hunter College.
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Humaira Hansrod
Working for the World's Women
Born on the small island nation of Mauritius, off the coast of East Africa, Humaira Hansrod has become a citizen of the world who is finely attuned to women's struggle for human rights.
With a 2012 Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship for research, Hansrod (Macaulay Honors College at City College, BS in economics and political science, 2012) will examine the promising changes in Oman, where Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al-Said responded to the Arab Spring with pledges of economic and political reforms.
"From my readings and conversations with persons in the country, Omani women seem to be making significant progress," says Hansrod, who was traveling in the Middle East in June. "My interest is in women's economic participation, and statistics show that the government is promoting policies to encourage women's labor force participation in all sectors."
Oman, like the Gulf region, takes a conservative stance when it comes to women's work. Throughout the region, female poverty is rife, as are restrictions on how women can work and behave. But in Oman, she says, women appear to be "defying many of those assumptions we in the West have about Gulf – and Arab – women in general."
"If women are making as much progress as I'm assuming they are economically and educationally in Oman, this rejects the convention that traditional Arab/Muslim states are incompatible with women's economic freedom," she says. "Yes, there are hyper-conservative countries where women's progress is slower, but Oman's success would be an encouragement to women in both the conservative and liberal Arab states that women can be recognized and rewarded for their work."
Hansrod says her research will be "about and for the countless women who today are struggling to find their voice through their work. It is about helping them help themselves, about debunking the justifications for Arab/Muslim women's lack of economic rights, and situating the critical roles that governments can – and should – play in advancing the cause of the other half of their populations, which in many cases has been neglected."
She intends to begin her research in December and doesn't expect it to be easy to view the full scope of change. "This is a complicated subject, and I'm trying to keep an open mind, although I recognize that I'm going in with a set of assumptions already," she says. "I'm expecting the unexpected."
At 13, Hansrod left polyglot Mauritius, a country of blended ethnicities and a spectrum of religions (Hindu 48 percent, all Christian 32 percent, Muslim 17 percent, according to the 2000 census), for polyglot New York City. She attended the diverse International High School in Long Island City, which is designed for newcomers to the United States, before winning the full scholarship that Macaulay Honors College provides.
While pursuing her double major at City College, she used her $7,500 Macaulay Opportunities Fund allocation for travel in Jordan, Morocco and Egypt, living with families and studying Arabic, a language she is still learning. "Building my fluency is top-priority now," she says. The fund supported her independent study/senior thesis on women's rights in the Middle East.
She was chosen as a fellow of the Colin Powell Program in Leadership and Public Service at City College and was named one of its Dobrich New Americans Scholars from 2010-2012. The Powell fellowship and Macaulay program "have allowed me the opportunity to explore the world of opportunities outside campus and helped me shape a vision of the world from my own experiences as well as the theories I learned in class," she says. "When I was a student, I rarely saw myself as a Macaulay or Powell student. It's only in retrospect that I realize how much both have propelled me to pursue my interests in rather unconventional ways."
She deepened her understanding of other nations and peoples through the Model United Nations, an academic organization that operates intercollegiate conferences and can be taken for credit. She joined the City College team after hearing a speech about it at the Macaulay freshmen orientation and stuck with it throughout her undergraduate years. She calls it "the highlight of my time at CCNY. From the people I've met to the conferences I've participated in, I learned so much about the world through it."
Hansrod is leaving her future options open. "I don't want to say I'm only going to go to grad school, because I think it's also a fair pursuit to do policy-related work in government or an NGO or a civic center," she says in an interview posted on the Powell Center website. "But if a graduate degree is going to help me become a stronger advocate, then, sure, I'll pursue that, God willing."
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Cleveland Waddell
Cleveland Alexander Waddell (CUNY BA, Medgar Evers College, B.S. in Mathematical Sciences and Computer Science, 2012) has been accepted to North Carolina State University, where he will work on a Ph.D. in applied mathematics.
"Education means so much to me," he says. "My parents are an integral part of my educational foundation. As a child, I saw the success of my parents' education in their professional lives. My mother is a nurse, and my father is a doctor.
"For me, the best way to be successful in life is to get a good, solid education. My acceptance into the Ph.D. program in applied mathematics is due to the support, encouragement and the nurturing environment provided by my mentors in the Math and Computer Science Department at Medgar Evers."
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Patrice Grant
"Diligence, focus and determination led me to plan ahead and complete my degree in four years with a GPA of 3.927," says Patrice Grant (Medgar Evers, B.S. in biology, 2012). " I understand the need for quality health care in our communities and I would like to open a private practice to give back to our community. I am thankful of the support and guidance that I received from my mentors at Medgar Evers College."
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Christopher Hue
Breaking the Brain Barrier
Since the wars began in Iraq and Afghanistan, the news has been filled with stories about soldiers suffering traumatic brain injuries, which often are caused by improvised explosive devices. The Department of Defense last year estimated 50,000 cases, the Pentagon estimated 115,000 and the RAND Corp. reported that the count could be as high as 400,000.
Christopher Donald Hue (Macaulay Honors College at City College, BE in biomedical engineering, 2008) is conducting research that may lead to a fuller understanding of how explosions damage the brain, ways that injuries can be better treated and the possibility of developing novel helmets or other protective equipment to safeguard troops.
In the second year of a biomedical engineering doctoral program at Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, Hue has received a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This is the most prestigious award a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. Providing $126,000 over three years, it recognizes and supports exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields.
Hue works in the Neurotrauma and Repair Laboratory directed by Associate Professor Barclay Morrison III, who researches the biomechanics of traumatic brain injury and studies why these injuries kill brain cells. Hue's doctoral project looks at a segment of the problem – damage to the blood-brain barrier (BBB), the selectively permeable barrier in cerebral microvessels that protects and maintains the brain's microenvironment.
The BBB is a complex interface between the peripheral circulation and the central nervous system. This tightly regulated structure S-shields the brain from macromolecules and neurotoxic substances circulating in the blood, while allowing in specific nutrients and metabolites required by nervous tissue. It is due in large part to this specialized function that the BBB also presents a formidable obstacle to available treatment options for neurological diseases, inspiring the search for better methods to deliver material across this biological barrier to target cellular populations in the brain.
In the laboratory, Hue cultures brain endothelial cells to represent an in vitro model of the BBB and then exposes the model to "a controlled primary blast injury mimicking what soldiers sustain in the field. In doing so, I'm able to study how this exposure to blast will impact the barrier's structure and function."
This research in blast-induced traumatic brain injury conducted at Columbia is part of a larger collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University. The Army Research Office supports it via its Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative.
As part of another project in collaboration with chemical engineering Associate Professor Scott A. Banta, Hue is screening a randomized library of peptides using an in vitro model of the BBB to discover novel, cell-penetrating peptides that can cross the barrier. Ultimately, he hopes to find promising candidates that will be able to penetrate the BBB and deliver drugs to the brain to repair damage from a traumatic injury. "That's my long-term goal, and this is the starting point," he says.
"The NSF grant will help me delve more deeply into developing more complex models of the BBB," he says. "I'm now using a mouse brain microvascular cell line, but it would be more realistic to culture cells directly from animals, as well as to incorporate multiple cell types to better represent the complexity of the barrier. That would be my goal moving forward. The NSF grant gives me the independence to do that."
Hue, who was born and raised in Queens, was attracted to City College's Grove School of Engineering because "it was academically rigorous and prepared me for the environment here" at Columbia. "I felt very prepared to tackle grad school. I've even gone back to City College as a representative of [Columbia's] Graduate Biomedical Engineering Society to promote the grad school and our program."
He also was drawn to Macaulay Honors College, whose advisors "always pushed me and encouraged me to look for national fellowships and to be proactive. Being a Macaulay Honors student put me in a position to have access to a strong academic support network and to promising opportunities for pursuing my educational and professional goals."
At City College, Hue received the Josh and Judy Weston Public Service Scholarship, the Merck Engineering & Technology Fellowship and the Horace W. Goldsmith Scholarship. He also is a member of Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society.
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Christie Sukhdeo
On the Wings of Butterflies
"The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough," the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote some 90 years ago. The butterfly may still have time enough, but do humanity and the ecosystem that people have so disrupted?
Christie Anne Sukhdeo (City College, B.S. in biology 2011) won a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship by proposing to look at how the butterflies and birds, which pollinate Colombian coffee and cocoa crops, reveal the impact on biodiversity of human-caused habit changes. "We can model two types of possible changes: One is in the community structure of birds and butterflies that result from the conversion of natural habitats into agricultural lands," she says, "and the other is identifying key bird and butterfly pollinators of coffee and cocoa crops."
But as her NSF fellowship gets under way in the fall and she starts a doctoral conservation biology program at the University of New Orleans, she will focus on a slightly different target: the fragmentation of biomes in Madagascar due to human activities. (The NSF grant allows recipients to change direction in their graduate research.)
Butterflies, nevertheless, will remain her indicator. "They're easy to work with, to identify and to capture, and they're just beautiful creatures," she says.
The fellowship is the most prestigious award that a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. Providing $126,000 over three years, it recognizes and supports exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their field.
This spring, Sukhdeo is wrapping up a postgraduate year at City College with support from the CUNY Research Foundation. Since her senior year, she has been a research assistant in Assistant Professor David Lohman's molecular biology lab, completing a study of the phylogeography of Melanitis leda, a widespread Southeast Asian butterfly, and is preparing a paper about her findings. (Phylogeography describes the distribution of variations among individuals in a species due to either genetic [genotypic] or non-genetic [phenotypic] causes in a given area and within a historical framework that permits analysis of the divergence occurred.)
The first months spent on Melanitis leda proved frustrating. "After designing and carrying out many trial experiments and working with my mentor, I was still not obtaining the successful results needed to proceed to the next step of my investigation," she says. "Knowing that obtaining unfavorable results is part of scientific research and the journey to mastery is slow and tedious, I continued to work on the project with determination and my mentor's guidance. Professor Lohman was very supportive. He helped me get to where I am today in my academic career."
Her research at City College set the stage for her upcoming doctoral work with New Orleans Associate Professor Nicola Anthony, who focuses on the roles of species ecology and landscape history in shaping patterns of evolutionary diversification and genetic variability.
Sukhdeo came to ecology via a roundabout route. Born in Guyana, she and her family came to New York in 2000, when she was 12. Initially intending to become a New York City public school teacher, she enrolled in a City College undergraduate teacher-training program that came with a full scholarship. She finished that program – indeed, she graduated with New York State teacher certification in biology – but by then research had captured her imagination. "It's hard to decide at age 17 what you're going to do in your life," she says.
Her first undergraduate research project, with Professor Jeffrey Steiner, chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science, delved into how microbes interact with soil (specifically, how the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae forms neo-minerals in soils through the crystallization of clays). The next was an environmental project with adjunct Assistant Professor Diomaris Padilla in which she examined aerosol particulates with a scanning electron microscope and energy dispersive spectroscopy.
Then it was on to Lohman, where for two years she did DNA extractions, polymerase chain reactions (PCR, which is a technique to amplify copies of a section of DNA, making thousands or millions of them), PCR cleanups and DNA sequencing. Along the way, she received a New York City Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Scholarship, as well as several City College grants to support her studies.
In the summer of 2011, she was off to Sri Lanka and Thailand, traveling under a CCNY City Seeds Fellowship to study the interaction of Buddhism with biodiversity conservation in Southeast Asia. Buddhism, she explains, promotes biodiversity by forbidding the killing of animals and plants. Lohman is the principal investigator, and this was her last undergraduate opportunity to do fieldwork.
"To me, this project has shown how non-biological approaches can be used to curb biodiversity loss," she says. "The results of the study can be used to increase people's knowledge about the types of organisms present in the communities studied and their ecological values. The religion or way of life can help get the message across to the people effectively and quickly."
That trip "crystallized my undergraduate research experiences and played a significant role in defining the research I would like to undertake as a graduate student," she says.
Just a few months before, she had had her first fieldwork experience, again with Lohman. "I went to the Dominican Republic to capture butterflies to use for my project," she says. "This fieldwork experience made me develop a strong liking for butterflies. I prefer working with them over rodents any day."
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Vincent Xue
Making Sure Research Computes
Suppose you were trying to determine the genes that code for the proteins that regulate the body's response to hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, in solid tumors. (You'd be doing that because cancer can create oxygen-starved areas in tumors, and most solid tumors are more resilient to oxygen deprivation than healthy organs. The body's response to hypoxia thus can contribute to malignancy and offer a pathway to treatment; turn off the tumor cells' ability to adapt to hypoxia and you could kill the tumor.)
Suppose further that you were looking for clues to treatment in the genome of an organism that survives severe and prolonged hypoxia better than humans can – say a particular strain of Drosophila, the common fruit fly. What's the exact mechanism the fly uses? Which genes get switched on or off? What if changes occur in covariant amino acid sites on the protein (that is, when one changes, so does the other)? And how do those changes dictate secondary and tertiary sequences of the proteins they construct?
What's going on is so complex that it's all but impossible for a solitary scientist to figure out without expert computer help.
Enter two new fields: bioinformatics, which involves compiling and maintaining the database of biological information that has erupted since the dawn of genomics, and computational biology, which is the art and skill of analyzing and interpreting those data.
Enter, also, researchers like Vincent Xue (Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, BA in computer science, minor in biology, 2012).
The National Science Foundation has awarded Xue a coveted 2012 Graduate Research Fellowship to pursue bioinformatics and computational biology. This is the most prestigious award a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can receive. Providing up to $126,000 over three years, it recognizes and supports exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their field.
Xue will begin his doctoral work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall. "Their biology and computational science faculty are definitely at the top," he says. "I intend to do both wet and dry lab. I want to be doing the experiments as well as the analysis. It's essential for biologists to have a strong computational component and knowledge." He intends to work on gene therapy.
He says that his experience at Hunter College has prepared him well. The questions about hypoxia resistance in Drosophila arose from the computational biology lab of Professor Lei Xie. To better understand the mechanisms behind hypoxia, Xue developed a Web tool to analyze and visualize the effect of correlated amino acid mutations on protein structure.
Xue's introduction to the field was in the Evolutionary Bioinformatics Laboratory of Associate Professor of Biology Weigang Qiu, who is interested in the comparative analysis of multiple genomes of the Lyme disease pathogen. "He introduced me to bioinformatics, and I fell in love with it."
In his sophomore year, Xue was invited to a computational biology winter workshop at MIT. The following summer, at the MIT Summer Research Program, he developed a visualization tool to analyze gene splicing.
Macaulay Honors College was "a huge factor in my decision to come to CUNY," Xue says. Besides the financial incentive of free tuition, there was the Opportunities Fund. It provides each student with $7,500 for travel, living expenses and a stipend during internships, fieldwork, research and other educational experiences.
In his junior year, Xue used his Opportunities allocation during a seven-month internship as a trainee at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, near Cambridge, U.K. There, he developed a Web application and did high-performance computing. "The experience was one of the most informative and enlightening of my four years," he says.
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Roman Levites
Born in Moscow and now a U.S. citizen, Roman Levites chose CUNY BA so he could design a degree that would capitalize on a subject for which he had a great interest, aptitude and knowledge.
Several years ago, Levites (CUNY BA, BS in Technology and the Law, 2012) began volunteering at the nonprofit housing law firm Eviction Intervention Services, which operated out of a church on 63rd Street in Manhattan. He worked on many jobs while assigned as paralegal for the senior lawyer who trained him.
Two months into his volunteer service, the firm offered him a full-time paid position. He managed the court calendar, performed client intakes and case management, researched case law, prepared pleadings, submitted court documents, appeared on behalf of clients as a tenant advocate at the Department of Social Services and New York City Housing Authority hearings and interacted with opposing lawyers.
He also wrote grant proposals, assisted the senior lawyer with training new lawyers, case workers and interns, assisted in legal clinics for senior citizens and translated for non-English- speaking clients. During budget cuts in 2008, he was laid off but continued as a volunteer. Shortly thereafter, he got a full-time position as the legal clinics administrator/office manager/ paralegal for the legal clinics at Cardozo School of Law/Yeshiva University. He has been there ever since.
At Cardozo, his responsibilities include managing the caseloads for the Criminal Appeals and Criminal Defense Clinics. Each involves filing and serving papers in state and federal court, as well as other courts, including landlord/tenant, civil, immigration and surrogates. He is also the administrator of the case management software used by the legal clinics and has become their resident expert in legal technology, guiding faculty and students in the use of the technology and troubleshooting electronic and software issues.
"For years, I had a desire to attend law school," he says. "My area of concentration did not influence my choice of graduate school, but the graduate school where I work did influence my choice of a concentration. I believe that understanding law, the philosophy and psychology behind it, as well as the technology that encompasses it today, are all important toward my formation as an attorney."
In law school, he plans to concentrate on landlord-tenant law and the laws regarding the Internet and technology.
Levites started college as an apprehensive adult: He was 33 when he enrolled at Kingsborough Community College. In his first semester, he took on a 17-credit course load although he was working full time, expecting his first child and caring for his elderly mother. Three Dean's List semesters later, he'd earned 69 credits (which included six Honors courses), a 3.77 GPA, a Presidential Honors Scholarship Award and his associate's degree. He describes feeling empowered by Kingsborough's attentive faculty, diverse and energetic student body and beautiful campus.
He entered CUNY BA in 2011, making Baruch his home campus. For his area, he took courses at Baruch, City Tech, John Jay and Medgar Evers Colleges, in law, accounting, computer information systems, graphic design, philosophy and psychology. In 2012, he was awarded 15 life-experience credits by CUNY BA for his work in legal research, writing and procedures. He will attend Cardozo School of Law in the fall.
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Cheryl Mazzeo
Accepted to Albert Einstein College of Medicine Ph.D. program in Biomedical Sciences with annual scholarship of $31K+ and many other benefits.
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Therese Savery-Connors
"I was nine when I wrote my first college application essay," says Therese Savery-Connors. "It was to Johnson & Wales in Rhode Island. I told them all about how I wanted to be a chef when I grew up."
When she graduated from high school at 17, the youngest in her class, Savery-Connors (CUNY BA, College of Staten Island, BS in Food Service Administration for Disaster Relief, 2012 ) wasn't as interested in cooking as she was in changing the world: She sat on the town council, ran peer counseling groups and had taken classes in politics and economic development at SUNY New Paltz, where she completed more than 40 credits but left without a degree. She then went back to her first love, cooking.
"I have a thousand tales to tell of a dozen years in kitchens across America: the resorts, the cruise ships, the formal French apprenticeship that earned me the pleats in my toque," she says.
Next, she volunteered to cook for people in New Orleans and Houston after Hurricane Katrina. Her degree plan in CUNY BA is an outgrowth of that experience. She wants to transfer her skills from luxury restaurants and banquet halls to soup kitchens and food pantries to benefit people during disasters.
Working with Professor Elizabeth Schaible, she chose courses from City Tech, John Jay and the College of Staten Island that covered social services, public policy, organizational management, nutrition, food safety, emergency planning and workforce management. She was selected for the NYU/Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine Health Career Opportunity Program for summer 2011, where she provided direct human services and learned about the U.S. health-care system, policy, ethics and working with people with disabilities. She later completed an internship through the College of Staten Island's Bertha Harris Women's Center aimed at campus-community engagement and activism based around women's issues. She participated in the CUNY Women's Center Council and was hired to be assistant to the director of student affairs, focusing on career services and women's centers.
In spring 2011, CUNY BA awarded her 15 life-experience credits in culinary arts, baking, dining room operations and food and beverage cost control. In summer 2011, she was awarded the Marsha Palanci Cornerstone Hospitality Award by Les Dames d'Escoffier, an organization of professional women in the culinary/hospitality industry.
Academically, her interests have turned toward research: She is designing primary research on food safety perceptions and behaviors of volunteer food-service workers and studying how policy is implemented in the United States, federal-state structure in food safety and emergency management, deconstructing legislation and recommending action in the way increased federal emergency grant funding is used to improve public health and food safety.
For this project, she has sought support and inclusion in programming sponsored by the Red Cross, the Council on Foreign Affairs and the Christian Regenhard Center for Emergency Response Studies at John Jay.
Savery-Connors has been accepted to Tulane University in New Orleans for the master's in disaster resilience leadership science program and will start in the fall.
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Catherine Detrow
Speaking Their Language
The Almanya Türkleri – as the Turkish Germans call themselves – started coming to Germany in large numbers in the 1950s and 1960s as "guest workers" because of labor shortages. Numbering about 4 million, 1.7 million of them German citizens, they comprise 5 percent of the population; most are second- and third-generation descendants and later immigrants. The resulting mix is at best multicultural, at worst a point of friction among xenophobic elements of the German majority.
Exploring the relationship between culture, ethnicity and identity among these immigrants and their descendants is at the heart of the research that Catherine "Casey" Detrow intends to carry out while on a 2012 Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship. She'll also teach English in a German elementary school in Berlin.
She graduated magna cum laude from Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College in 2011 with a BA in anthropology and gender studies, an interdisciplinary focus on language, gender and social change, and a minor in German.
"I want to look at critical cultural politics as seen by Turkish migrant youth and German youth and how, seen through a sociolinguistic lens, you can facilitate more taboo conversations in a language that isn't native to either group," Detrow says. That, of course, is English, which, she says, most German high schoolers can speak at a conversational level far above what their typical American peers can muster in a foreign language. "They blow us out of the water."
Not that Detrow has trouble talking in a foreign language. She's fluent in German, the language in which she immersed herself at 16 during a Rotary Club-sponsored youth exchange. In college, she followed that with a three-month internXchange Fellowship, a journalism program in which she interned as a staff reporter at a German newspaper, the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten.
She also can jabber in Punjabi, learned in a U.S. State Department critical-language scholarship to India; that involved three months of 40-hour-a-week lessons. And she's fluent in Spanish, picked up some Portuguese during a month-long CUNY study-abroad venture and can chat in French. Macaulay's $7,500-per-student Opportunities Fund paid for her travel to Brazil and China over school breaks.
"You learn language strategies to fit together pieces of these dissimilar languages," she says. "While the grammar and vocabulary aren't always similar, your brain makes connections to aid your understanding. The key thing is complete immersion and complete shamelessness."
Macaulay and Hunter offered endless encouragement in her intellectual inquiry, she says. "Mike Lamb, Macaulay's associate director of immersive and personalized education, has been a huge support and major source of inspiration, motivation and encouragement as well as a good friend. At Hunter, I received much guidance from the teaching adjuncts in the gender studies program, who are mostly PhD candidates pursuing their own research while teaching. Though they aren't full-time faculty members, they provided me with much academic insight, and I owe a lot of my undergraduate success to them."
The idea for her research arose partly from her work as a teaching assistant at Hunter College in the fall of 2011, after she had graduated. "There are so many students who speak English as a second language," she says. "We talked about culture, race and identity in the classroom, and I drew on that experience for my Fulbright proposal."
Detrow has been admitted to an MA program in linguistics at Humboldt University in the former East Berlin. After that, she may get a doctorate. "But who knows? I like to write," she says. "I like to read and talk. I like to travel."
One way or another, she wants to delve into the sociological and psychological aspects of language. "If you grow up perceiving the world in multiple languages, it opens up social flexibility and room for interpretations," she says. "The semantics of different languages cause you to understand and see things differently. You become more flexible socially and, in the long run, politically."
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Jordan Stockdale
Learning, from Teaching
Jordan Stockdale (Hunter College MA, special education, 2012) grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, but he wanted to live and teach in New York "to see what else was out there."
He got his chance when he signed up for the New York City Teaching Fellows program, which gives incoming public school teachers on-the-job training while paying for their master's degrees.
For the past two years, he has taught special-needs sixth-graders at East Harlem's PS 57, "a high-needs school and a really good school," he says. "Being a minority male, I want to inspire younger students who look like me to succeed."
He won a Fulbright Fellowship to teach English and other subjects at a secondary school in Madrid, Spain, for 2012-13.
"The Fulbright gives me the opportunity to pursue my passion of teaching while exploring another culture," he says.
He has studied abroad before, traveling to Argentina for three months while earning his 2010 bachelor's degree at the University of Missouri. "I do speak Spanish in East Harlem, so I can practice in Spain," he says.
He was drawn to teach special education as an undergraduate while working at an after-school program called Intersections.
"I liked working with people who would be labeled ED, having emotional disorders," he says. "I realized that a lot of people I knew growing up, close family, had something that they might have had an IEP [individualized educational program for special education] for."
Stockdale intends to return to teaching in the city, but future plans include doctoral studies in political science, with a focus on U.S. foreign policy, and several years of teaching on the college level. He hopes to eventually return to teaching secondary-school students.
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Kayhan Irani
Making Her Mark on the World's Stage
When she was in fourth grade, Kayhan Irani (CUNY BA, 2008) wrote her first full-length play.
"It was about a woman suffragette who was fighting for women's right to vote and was in an abusive relationship," she says. "A wonderful teacher let me put it on for the rest of the class." Fairness is "a very deep impulse I've always had," as is "empathy with other human beings who are suffering."
Those moral pillars pointed her toward a CUNY Baccalaureate constructed with courses in theater, political science, media studies, anthropology and urban studies at Brooklyn, City and Hunter Colleges and CUNY's School of Professional Studies.
Seeking to merge theater with "activism and social change, to activate audiences and transform society," Irani has made a career of teaching people who have experienced oppression how to transform their lives by creating theatrical works drawn from their own lives and realities. She has worked with groups from the South Bronx to UCLA, from public schools to juvenile detention facilities, from Iraq to Afghanistan.
Now, with a 2012 Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she will return to the Parsi community in India, into which she was born, to gather material for a play.
Perhaps her commitment to fair play and social change arose from a family story about a pomegranate orchard in their ancestral province of Yazd, Iran. They might not have been able to hold onto it if a relative had not converted from Zoroastrianism to Islam, since land ownership laws favored Muslims; out of respect, the relative delayed his conversion until his mother died.
Or perhaps it stems from the immigrant experience. Friction – most likely economic, but against a backdrop of unequal rights for religious minorities – propelled her grandparents from Yazd to the thousand-year-old Parsi community of Iranian immigrants in India. That's when the family name became Irani – someone from Iran.
When she was 3½, she and her parents left India for Rego Park, Queens, "a multicultural, working-class area where everyone was immigrant, everyone was different," she says.
A Jewish family from Uzbekistan invited her for Shabbos dinner and Passover Seder. A Chinese neighbor gave her cookies and a red envelope with a token amount of money in thanks for having included her daughter in a trip to a Chinese New Year celebration. Difference was normal.
A year after graduating from the High School of Performing Arts, Irani dropped out of college, hoping to use theater to change the world. In 2003, her one-woman show, "We've Come Undone," followed immigrant women in the wake of 9/11. Interacting with members of the audience, engaging them with her calls for political and social change, she performed the play nationally and internationally.
She became a practitioner and trainer in the Theatre of the Oppressed techniques of Brazilian director and activist Augusto Boal. In 2004, after the United States had invaded and occupied Iraq, she led theater workshops there that were aimed at teaching and healing children through the arts.
It was only then, at 26, that she returned to CUNY for a degree that would provide a scholarly context for her career. "The CUNY BA honored my mind as an older student," she says. "They give you so much guidance with faculty mentors, but they trust you and support you as you figure out where you want to go. Traditional theater was not where my passion lay, and the CUNY BA allowed me to create a small path in academia so I could reach my goal. CUNY is in my blood – I am CUNY."
In 2012, Irani and her family, in the United States and in India, established an annual $1,000 scholarship for the CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies. The Dina Arjani Scholarship, named for Irani's grandmother, is awarded to a student planning a career as a teacher. The first recipient is Christian Waterman, who is designing his degree in "Hip Hop Studies."
After graduation, she became the director of outreach and won a screenwriting New York Emmy for an English-as-a-second-language TV show called "We Are New York." Produced by CUNY and the Mayor's Office of Adult Education, the show introduces immigrants to the little things that New Yorkers take for granted but that can mystify newcomers.
Some years ago, several Afghani men came to her theater training sessions in New York. They told their colleagues, one of whom ran Afghanistan's longest-running radio soap opera.
"They wanted to expand, to use theater to get people talking and engaged," she says. "They put out a call for trainers; I submitted a résumé and was hired."
In the past two years, Irani has made four trips to Kabul and hopes to return. The challenges were many. "One is you have a country that has had 30-plus years of war, with total devastation of infrastructure," she says. "It's very hard to get people up to speed on the skills, on social-change thinking, because some have no education at all; some had their education interrupted because they had to flee."
Using theater is a stretch in a country that has a tradition of storytelling and poetry recitals, and where folk plays are designed to deliver moral messages. Theater, in the Western sense, is unknown; even movie theaters are scarce.
Still, she has held workshops with Afghanis who "want to make theater about their real lives, the problems they see, to make their society better."
With the help of a translator, she has worked in six Afghan provinces, including some, like Kandahar, whose names are familiar from news reports.
"The actors gravitate to mirroring the real world, such as the struggle for women to get educated, or what it's like to navigate government entities or dealing with corruption," she says.
Her classes in Afghanistan tended to have mostly men, which is not surprising in a country where schools for girls are burned and women's rights often are curtailed. Women participate when they can. "It depends on the locality whether women on stage are accepted," she says.
As for the obvious issue of safety, Irani says Kabul is pretty stable, and she lives and works in an Afghan neighborhood with an Afghan organization, not near the areas with embassies, international agencies and political offices that tend to be targeted.
In an April 15 blog post, Irani wrote that she was unaware of the attacks in Kabul until long after they had occurred that day – and she expressed compassion for all involved: "Some young men, this afternoon, were trying something; filled with fear, rage and hopelessness. I thought about the poor victims, their families. And then I wondered about the lives of these fighters. How dark and confused must their way be? 6 men against national and international armies isn't a fair fight, and they know it. They know that the most they can do is to disrupt things for a day or two before dying in the fight. It saddens me that no one had a candle for them. No one could help them see a future worth living for. They had given up on life."
With her research Fulbright to India, which was selected and primarily funded by the Indian government, Irani gives a new twist to her interests. She will study Parsi embroidery for a play she is writing called "Paisley."
Irani says the play focuses on the power of individual choice, set against the socio-political ferment of contemporary Iran. Two generations of master embroiderers face off in a family conflict. How they handle paisley – an Iranian design said to symbolize life and eternity that dates back to the Sassanid Dynasty (200-650 AD) – becomes "a metaphor for the writing and rewriting of history – personal, communal and national." What happens, she asks, "When remembering the past becomes a politically subversive act?"
Embroidery, which neither Irani nor her mother create, is common to cultures worldwide. "It's also a great metaphor that we weave pieces of our lives together, one stitch at a time," she says. "And then we can look back and realize we've created something larger. We can ask: 'What pattern am I creating in my life? How am I coloring this world when I make certain decisions?'
"People transform cultural practices to fit into the dominant narrative, but culture and cultural practices have very personal resonances. Something of the original intent always remains."
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Lakshman Kalasapudi
Lakshman Kalasapudi (CUNY BA in Urban Planning/South Asian Studies, Hunter College, 2012) has been accepted to the University of Manitoba, where he will work on a master's in anthropology and receive an annual stipend.
His project, "Increasing Millet Production in South Asia," is funded by the International Development Research Centre, part of the Canadian International Food Security Research Fund.
"I think my background in interdisciplinary studies really helped me become a viable candidate for this program," he says.
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Ilirjan Gjonbalaj
Finding His Roots
Nationalist violence devastated the Balkan country of Kosovo throughout the 1990s. Giving the world the phrase "ethnic cleansing" and ending in war crimes trials, Serbian forces drove more than a million people – most of them ethnic Albanians, who were and are Kosovo's majority – across the borders in an onslaught that killed hundreds of thousands more. NATO, led by the United States, waged an air campaign in 1999 before an uneasy peace took hold. Now the 10 percent Serbian minority lives mostly in heavily guarded enclaves, leaving the country very much a work in progress.
"Kosovo has always been a part of my life. I experienced the war by watching it on TV and through relatives and friends of relatives passing away," said Ilirjan Gjonbalaj (pronounced il-EER-ee-an JON-bah-lie), a 2012 graduate of Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College who has won a 2012 U.S. Student Fulbright Fellowship to teach English in Kosovo. "It took the United States and Western countries a long time to get involved and a lot of people died, but we were all glad that they intervened. Cities in Kosovo have Bill Clinton Boulevards, and Americans are more than welcome there."
Gjonbalaj was born in the Bronx to parents who had emigrated from Montenegro, a country to the west of Kosovo and to the north of Albania. "I was raised in an Albanian bubble," he said. "So it was super important for me to go to Hunter, which is one of the most diverse colleges in the U.S. And Macaulay's resources are great; they enabled me to study Arabic in Morocco and to volunteer in a home for HIV-infected children and teens in Salvador, Brazil."
CUNY also helped him become the first person in his family to graduate from a four-year college. He majored in biochemistry, with a minor in Arabic studies.
In Kosovo, Gjonbalaj will teach English in a high school and, in his spare time, teach health to youngsters. That's an outgrowth of the ninth-grade workshops he has run during his four years in college as a volunteer with Peer Health Exchange, a national nonprofit that trains college students to conduct health workshops in public schools that lack health education. In his senior year, he led, trained and managed the volunteers at Hunter. ""I can use the knowledge and skills I've attained these past four years as a PHE volunteer," he said, "and I can do it in English and Albanian," in which he is fluent.
When he gets home, Gjonbalaj intends to go to medical school. "I've always known I wanted to be a pediatrician."
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Susan Tsang
Relying on the Wings of Bats
The flying fox – cute by some measures, deadly by others.
With its foxlike head and large eyes, this animal has charisma not usually associated with a bat. But with bodies the length of a human forearm and wingspans of up to five or six feet, it can fly between islands in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, making it a perfect carrier of infectious diseases.
Working with the Center for Biodiversity Strategies at the University of Indonesia, Susan Tsang (CUNY Graduate Center, PhD in biology expected in 2014) is traveling into the jungle as a 2012-13 Fulbright Scholar to study the phylogeography of these animals – that is, how flying foxes are distributed in space and time in a given region.
"If we understand how populations are interconnected, we can improve global health," she says. "These bats are integral parts of the island ecosystem in Southeast Asia and the Pacific; they act as seed dispersers, which are necessary for the continued health of the forest. We also need to understand the ecology and evolution of a host as much as a pathogen in order to take preventive measures in case of an epidemic."
The risk of a bat-derived epidemic – like the fictitious one dramatized in the 2011 Steven Soderberg film "Contagion" – is a legitimate concern. Without getting sick, flying foxes have carried diseases like Lyssavirus and Hendra virus, which have killed livestock and people. They live in vast colonies of up to 50,000, where they easily can transmit viruses among themselves. And because flying foxes are fruit-eaters (unlike their insect-eating American bat cousins), they can transmit disease by dripping saliva onto fruit or defecating into sap-collection containers.
What's more, humans hunt them for food. "Their populations have dropped by 50 percent since people started taking bat counts for them," Tsang says.
Yet, she says, scientists have paid scant attention to flying foxes as disease vectors, focusing much more on birds and swine.
There are 65 recognized species of flying foxes (genus Pteropus) that traverse the Pacific and Indian Oceans from New Guinea and Australia, through tropical and subtropical Asia to the islands off eastern Africa.
Tsang became interested in bats as an undergraduate at Skidmore College (BA in biology, magna cum laude, 2009), for bats are not nearly as well studied as birds – and uncharted islands of knowledge lure researchers.
What really caught her attention is that, unlike most bats, flying foxes do not use sonar to navigate but rely upon their eyes and keen sense of smell. And with their large and flat teeth (as opposed to the American bat's little sharp teeth), they eat only plants. How and why they are so different from most other bats is a question that has caught the attention of many researchers, but the answer still remains unknown.
DNA that Tsang will collect could shed light on how the flying fox evolved away from sonar and got so big as well as to map flying fox populations. And with those maps, disease-prevention experts can plan containment strategies. "I have a collaborator in Singapore who determines what viruses bats have," she says, "but there hasn't been that much effort put into virus-discovery yet."
To learn how to handle flying foxes and see whether she could collect DNA noninvasively from fecal samples at roosting sites, Tsang last year used a National Science Foundation East Asia-Pacific Summer Institute Graduate Fellowship out of Singapore to spend time with captive bats. "It's a good, noninvasive method that could stimulate research in this notoriously elusive bat," she says.
In June, she will head out into the wild with her advisor and collaborators, assisted by local guides. Besides collecting bat guano, she will capture live individuals, take a biopsy punch (a small sample of the skin of the wing that does not hurt them) and swab the insides of their mouth, looking for diseases. "They might have herpes in the mouth but an entirely different set of viruses in their feces," she says.
During her Fulbright year, she hopes to broaden her DNA-gathering by going through flying fox specimens in various Indonesian collections – "skins that they've collected over hundreds of years. That would increase my sampling." In addition, she intends to visit more sites in Indonesia where roosts have been found.
Tsang, who was born in Hong Kong and came to the United States with her family when she was 5, says she chose to do her doctoral research at CUNY because of its partnership with the American Museum of Natural History. She works with CUNY Assistant Professor David Lohman, a butterfly expert who has worked extensively in Southeast Asia, and Nancy Simmons, the museum's curator of vertebrate zoology.
"Your goal at the end of your graduate studies is to become the expert in that thing," she says. "My advisors are experts, and synthesizing what I have learned from them is part of the fun of doing independent research."
And then there's the joy of fieldwork. "These are impressive animals," she says, "and when 15,000 of them go foraging for food at dusk, it darkens the sky."
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David Bauer
The Right Chemistry
David L.V. Bauer was a 2009 Rhodes Scholar. A chemistry major in the Macaulay Honors College at The City College of New York, he is conducting research in clinical medicine at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University. Bauer won first prize in the Intel Science Talent Search in 2005 while a student at Hunter College High School. He also won a Harry S. Truman Scholarship for Public Service and a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, as well as the Macaulay Honors College Chancellor's Award and the Creativity Foundation's Legacy Award. His extracurricular activities at City College included serving as vice president, president and co-president of the Baskerville Chemistry Society, chemistry workshop recitation instruction and anchor for CUNY-TV's "Study with the Best" series.
He also was a 2009 recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He is specializing in bioengineering and biomedical research.
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Lev Sviridov
Making Scholarship a Science
Lev A. Sviridov used his 2005 Rhodes Scholarship to pursue a master of science degree to conduct research in inorganic chemistry, focusing on the crystalline properties of aerosols. He received a D. Phil. in inorganic chemistry from Oxford University's New College. A chemistry major at The City College of New York, Sviridov had a strong interest in public and international affairs. While at City College, he had an exemplary academic record and was awarded a Goldwater Fellowship in Science. Sviridov was heavily involved in governance and public affairs, on and off campus, serving in undergraduate student government. At age 11, he came to New York City from Moscow with his mother, a journalist who fled Russia for political and security reasons. They spent some time homeless, and Sviridov learned English, in part, when he was playing softball in Central Park.
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Eugene Shenderov
From Chernobyl to Cancer Research
Eugene Shenderov, a graduate of Brooklyn College, was a 2005 Rhodes Scholarship recipient. He is working on his doctorate in immunology, with a specialty in cancer research, at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. While at Brooklyn College, Shenderov participated in the college's prestigious Coordinated BA-MD program. The program prepares students for medical studies at Downstate College of Medicine of the State University of New York. Shenderov was the recipient of the Brooklyn College Foundation Presidential Scholarship, the Peter F. Vallone Academic Scholarship and the Irving R. and Pauline K. Shaw Chemistry Scholarship. He also was president of the Brooklyn College Chess Team, a member of the Golden Key International Honour Society at Brooklyn College, a director of the Brooklyn College Emergency Medical Squad and a three-time letter-winner on the men's tennis team. Born in the Ukraine, Shenderov was 2 years old when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, 140 miles from his home, melted down. He developed leukemia, and the Shenderovs immigrated to Brooklyn to seek treatment when he was 6.
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Celine Joiris
Using Brain Power To Focus on Neuroscience
Celine Joiris, of the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, is one of four CUNY juniors in 2011 to win highly competitive Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships, the premier federally funded undergraduate scholarship to encourage graduate study in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering.
The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, established by Congress, awarded 275 scholarships for the 2011-2012 academic year to U.S. sophomores and juniors. They were selected from a field of 1,095 mathematics, science and engineering students who were nominated by their colleges and universities. Virtually all intend to earn a PhD. The one- and two-year scholarships cover tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to $7,500 a year. Many Goldwater Scholars have gone on to win prestigious post-graduate fellowships, including 77 Rhodes Scholarships (including four in 2011), 108 Marshall Awards and 98 Churchill Scholarships.
Joiris, also a Horace W. Goldsmith scholar, plans on pursuing a PhD in neuroscience. She is majoring in psychology and concentrating in neuroscience. She received a Harcourt Fellowship for undergraduate science research this spring. She studied the effects of stress on kinase Mz, a protein linked to learning and memory, under Hunter Professor Peter Serrano and a collaborating lab at SUNY Downstate Medical Center. At Johns Hopkins University last summer, she researched neural systems. She now studies with Dr. Michael Long at the NYU Smilow Neuroscience Center, examining the neural mechanisms that govern the timing required for intricate motor skills, using the song of the zebra finch as her model.
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Ayodele Oti
Working for World Health
Ayodele Oti, of Macaulay Honors College at The City College of New York and the CUNY Baccalaureate Program, CUNY's individualized degree, is one of two CUNY juniors in 2011 to win a highly competitive, $30,000 Harry S. Truman Scholarship for graduate study leading to careers in government or public service.
The other is Gareth Rhodes, of The City College of New York and the CUNY Baccalaureate Program, like her an honors student, Colin Powell Fellow and New York Life Scholar.
Each year, the Harry S. Truman Foundation, funded by Congress, awards one grant in each state plus 15 at-large; this year, the foundation received 602 applications from 264 colleges and universities, selected 197 candidates from 134 colleges and universities as finalists then selected the 65 finalists after personal interviews. Selection is based on a combination of career and graduate study interests, community service and academic achievement.
Oti is majoring in international studies and focusing on sustainable development and environmental public health. This spring, she is in Costa Rica, studying Spanish, tropical marine biology and Latin America under a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship. Her career goal is to advise governments in developing countries about public health programs, particularly to improve maternal and child health.
"Ayo is an extraordinary young woman who lives the Macaulay mission – seeking knowledge and experience that will help her meet the world's great challenges," says Ann Kirschner, university dean of Macaulay Honors College. "Ayo is the fifth Truman Scholar in Macaulay's brief, ten-year history, and we share in her family's pride in her accomplishments."
"I am excited to be one of the representatives from City College, and I look forward to all the opportunities being a Truman Scholar will afford me," says Oti, who has a 3.94 GPA. "But most of all, I am thankful for all of the people who have helped me get this far."
Born in Tallahassee, Fla., she entered City College on a scholarship from the Macaulay Honors College. Her public service interest was evident from her freshman year, when she was one of 48 participants in a Harvard Kennedy School of Government Public Policy and Leadership Conference. She later did a summer internship in Washington, through CCNY's Rosenberg/Humphrey Program in Public Policy.
Her interest in historical ecology took her to the Caribbean island of Barbuda in January 2010 and Iceland in July 2010, the latter with support from a National Science Foundation grant to participate in an archaeology field school. She also is a Rangel Scholar, Goldsmith Scholar, Lisa Goldberg/Revson Scholar and Starr Scholar.
"As a student who is interested in the environment, particularly with regard to sustainable development and public health, I wanted to explore past human-environment interactions to see what lessons I could possibly learn to help with the future," says Oti, the daughter of a Nigerian father and American mother. Her career goal is to work for a nonprofit dealing with international development in Latin America or Africa.
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Gareth Rhodes
Heading into Public Service
Gareth Rhodes, of The City College of New York and the CUNY Baccalaureate Program, CUNY's individualized degree, is one of two CUNY students in 2011 to win a highly competitive, $30,000 Harry S. Truman Scholarship for graduate study leading to careers in government or public service.
The other is junior Ayodele Oti, of Macaulay Honors College at The City College of New York and the CUNY Baccalaureate Program, like him an honors student, Colin Powell Fellow and New York Life Scholar.
Each year, the Harry S. Truman Foundation, funded by Congress, awards one grant in each state plus 15 at-large; this year, the foundation received 602 applications from 264 colleges and universities, selected 197 candidates from 134 colleges and universities as finalists then selected the 65 finalists after personal interviews. Selection is based on a combination of career and graduate study interests, community service and academic achievement.
Rhodes studies political economy and public policy. His advanced placement credits from high school and courses taken in two intersession study-abroad programs enabled him to complete his undergraduate degree in 2011 in only three years. Rhodes, who has a 3.8 GPA, also received a Gilman Scholarship, which he used to study Chinese business and Mandarin at the University of Shanghai. He also studied in Buenos Aires on a Study/Travel Opportunities for CUNY Students scholarship.
In addition, he is in the Skadden, Arps Honors Program in legal studies, interned with Andrew Cuomo's attorney general and gubernatorial staffs, the White House scheduling office and Rep. Charles Rangel's Harlem office.
"From these internships, I have gained an appreciation and interest in the role of government and public policy in the livelihoods of ordinary Americans," says Rhodes, who grew up in Kingston, N.Y., and lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "I am honored to receive the Truman Scholarship and join a network of similarly interested peers who are committed to public service work. I am thankful for the encouragement, support and guidance I was given at CCNY during the application process, particularly from those in the Honors Center."
CCNY President Lisa Staiano-Coico says that "having two Truman Scholars in one year puts City College in very elite company. We are exceptionally proud of Ayodele and Gareth and congratulate them on their stunning achievements. They are amazing people and fitting heirs to the long legacy of leadership in public service at City College that includes Gen. Colin L. Powell, USA (ret.), '58; Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1902; and Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson, '72."
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Anthony Pang
Shooting for the Stars
Anthony Pang (City College, 2011), who will study spacecraft propulsion at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of five CUNY students to win 2011 awards under the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
It is geared to assuring the vitality and diversity of America's scientific and engineering workforce. Pang received an NSF grant of $121,500 over three years. He will work toward a doctorate with MIT Professor Manuel Martinez-Sanchez on plasma dynamic simulations for space thrusters.
Already offered a fully paid research assistantship for the project, Pang will develop simulations for plasma thrusters and ionospheric interactions with spacecraft.
"Long-distance, interplanetary space exploration missions are most viable with advanced plasma propulsion engines and, as such, it is a priority to expand our understanding of the field," Pang said.
Martinez-Sanchez, director of the MIT Space Propulsion Laboratory, has pioneered the development of radio-frequency propulsion systems and is known for research on Hall thrusters and electrospray propulsion.
"With time and extensive effort, Martinez-Sanchez' work could make the Mars mission a reality," Pang said.
As a City College undergraduate, Pang ventured toward space with Professor Charles Watkins, for two years working on CUNY's multi-campus "cubesat" program. In this NASA initiative, students design small but very real satellites that the space agency launches during its big-science missions; he worked on the structures, mechanisms and thermal control subsystem team. Earlier, he worked on robotics with Professor Jizhong Xiao, then joined a student initiative to modify a Lister diesel engine to run on biofuel made from the oil-rich seeds of the jatropha plant.
Last summer, he did computer modeling at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as part of research into the movement of polar and Greenland ice sheets. "We looked at how the propagation of meltwater from ice sheets affects lubrication under the ice sheets and accelerates the process; the faster the ice sheets move, the faster they become icebergs, melt and cause the sea to rise," he said.
As a Colin Powell Fellow and president of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society, Pang initiated and is involved in a community outreach program where undergraduates teach engineering classes at the High School for Math, Science and Engineering on the City College campus.
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Lina Gonzalez
Site-Specific Drug Delivery
Lina Mercedes Gonzalez (Hunter College, 2009, who is earning a PhD in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, is one of five CUNY students to win 2011 awards under the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. It is geared to assuring the vitality and diversity of America's scientific and engineering workforce.
Her research is part of a broad quest to deliver drugs to the specific site where they're needed. The NSF granted her $90,000 over three years to work on a "swimmer" drug-delivery vehicle. The swimmer – measured in micrometers (hundredths of a centimeter) – is made of polydimethylsiloxane, or PDMS, a silicon-based organic polymer that's used in everything from contact lenses to shampoos. Call it a nanobot, a tiny robot that can be injected into the body to perform medical procedures.
To work, the swimmer needs two systems – guidance and propulsion.
For guidance, Gonzalez turns to infinitesimally small magnetic particles that are naturally manufactured by magnetotactic bacteria. She extracts these particles and inserts them into the swimmer. Once the swimmer is in the body, it can be guided by external magnets.
For propulsion, she is working on a "pea whistle" system that's roughly analogous to a basketball coach's whistle. When it's blown, air is forced into a chamber and exits through a slot; a "pea" bounces in the chamber, producing a warbling sound. Gonzalez said that in the swimmer, a microscale pressure tank will do the blowing and provide the propulsion. (Other researchers take a different tack to nanobot propulsion, trying to emulate flagella, the tail-like parts of many types of cells.)
Gonzalez conducts her research with Carnegie Mellon Professor Philip R. LeDuc and Professor William C. Messner, who are collaborating on ways to probe cellular mechanics using microfluidics, mechanatronics and control theory.
Gonzalez, who expects to earn her doctorate within three years, intends to become a professor with her own lab. "The math, physics and chemistry I took at Hunter have helped a lot," she said.
She particularly credits Hunter physics Professor Steven G. Greenbaum "for guiding me throughout my undergraduate career." Among other things, he encouraged her to twice work at Caltech, where she "interacted with mechanical engineers and bioengineers, and that helped me make a decision to pursue a career as a mechanical engineer."
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Philipa Njau
Getting Down to the Molecules
Philipa A. Njau, an honors student majoring in biochemistry at The City College of New York, was named a 2005 Goldwater Scholar by the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation.
Njau, who was born in Tanzania and graduated from high school in Kenya, was one of 320 college sophomores and juniors chosen for the prestigious award, which carries a $7,500 stipend. She was selected from a field of 1,091 mathematics, science and engineering students nominated by the faculties of colleges and universities nationwide.
"This is an immense honor for me, and I would like to thank my mentor, Dr. Mark Steinberg, and others who have guided me at City College," said Njau, now a Harlem resident. She aspires to pursue a PhD and work as a research scientist in the biophysical and biochemical fields.
"I would like to spend my professional life trying to understand the structure and function of molecules, to understand proteins and how they fold to their functional units. Such an aspiration would require an understanding of the physical laws that govern such a premise, as well as the molecular properties of the particles in question. I'd also love to teach," she added.
Her research under David Gosser and Themis Lazaridis, both from the Chemistry Department at City College, has focused on the interaction of molecules with one another.
Njau, who enrolled in City College in 2001, has received several awards from the college, including the MARC/RISE Scholarship, the E.Y. "Yip" Harburg Alumni Association Scholarship, the City College Scholars Award and the CCNY Black Alumni's William Wright Scholarship.
With the award to Njau, City College chemistry majors have won Goldwater Scholarships in two consecutive years. Lev A. Sviridov, who is also a 2005 Rhodes Scholar, earned a Goldwater Scholarship in 2004. Previous Goldwater Scholars at City College include Wilmert Pereyra (Electrical Engineering, 1995), Catherine Okonji (Biology, 1996), Shiv N. Singh (Chemical Engineering/Economics, 1997) and Sendy S. Louis (Chemical Engineering, 1998).
Congress established The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in 1986 to honor Sen. Barry M. Goldwater, who served his country for 56 years as a soldier and statesman, including 30 years in the Senate. The Virginia-based foundation's purpose is to provide a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians and engineers by awarding scholarships to college students who intend to pursue careers in these fields.
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Miriam Ginzberg
Miriam B. Ginzberg
Miriam B. Ginzberg, an honors chemistry major interested in pharmaceutical materials science, was a 2007 Goldwater Scholar. At that time, the Kew Gardens resident was weighing offers for graduate study from Harvard, MIT and Rockefeller University.
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Yehoshua Laker
High Hopes of Making a Difference
Yehoshua Nechemia Laker, 21, a biology/English major and a math and natural sciences honor student at Queens College, has won a prestigious 2008 Goldwater Scholarship for his senior year.
His classmate, chemistry major Ross Radusky, also 21, has received an honorable mention from the Goldwater Foundation, which runs the scholarship program. Named for late Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the national initiative recognizes outstanding students in math, science and engineering; sophomores and juniors are eligible for one- or two-year awards that provide as much as $7,500 annually toward tuition, fees, books and room and board.
The two Queens College honorees were chosen from a highly competitive pool of 1,035 undergraduates nominated by college and university faculties across the country.
"We are so proud of Yehoshua and Ross, who exemplify the very best of our students," says Queens College President James Muyskens. "Their achievements testify to their own hard work and the rich research environment and mentorship opportunities available on campus. Along with our award-winning faculty, they enhance our national reputation for excellence in the liberal arts and sciences."
In the mornings, Laker studies Talmud at the Yeshiva B'nei Torah near his home in Far Rockaway. He spends his afternoons tackling a heavy pre-med course load at Queens College, where he also conducts cancer research, copyedits and writes a technology column for the school newspaper and runs on the college's track team. Last summer, he volunteered in Nyack Hospital's emergency room. When asked what drives him, this mild-mannered upperclassman answers matter-of-factly that he seeks "to gain wisdom and grow my mind, body and soul."
While he's still weighing his professional aspirations – he hopes he can explore "an amalgam of fields" – Laker is strongly considering the pursuit of an MD/PhD degree that would allow him to combine medicine with research in cellular biology or biochemistry.
"I derive great pleasure from applying science to my life and would like to discover new ideas and innovations in healing that would make this a better, healthier world," he says.
One of five children, Laker says he would not be where is today without the support and encouragement of family, teachers and friends. Laker's father has been a computer programmer at IBM for more than 25 years, and his mother formerly worked in speech pathology and audiology. So it was only natural, he explains, that "a dedication to the sciences would be an integral part" of his culture and mindset. "My parents instilled in me a love for learning and a drive for pursuing knowledge."
Laker credits "the amazing, dedicated professors at Queens College" for advancing his passion for science. For the last three semesters, he has worked in the cell biology research lab of Queens College biology Professor Karl Fath and the cancer research lab of biochemistry Professor Wilma Saffran. Laker is helping Saffran analyze the DNA repair mechanisms in yeast that are resistant to the damaging effects of carcinogens. Because yeast is genetically similar to human cells, this research could have profound implications for cancer prevention and survival.
Saffran, director of the college's mathematics and natural sciences honors program, mentors Laker and Radusky. "They're excellent students – bright, enthusiastic, determined, self-motivated and well-rounded … I really enjoy having them in my lab," she says.
Radusky, who lives in Neponsit, is majoring in chemistry with a concentration in biochemistry. A member of the Macaulay Honors College and a math and natural sciences honors student, Radusky is interested in orthopedic surgery and plans to attend medical school. He has applied to the summer undergraduate program in musculoskeletal research — a field in which he hopes to specialize — at NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases. He supplements his course work by interning at WCBS-TV as a medical news contributor. In addition, he volunteers at North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital.
This is the third consecutive year in which Queens College students have received Goldwater Scholarships. Last year, Kew Gardens resident Miriam Ginzberg, an honors chemistry major interested in pharmaceutical materials science, won the award. She is now weighing offers for graduate study from Harvard, MIT and Rockefeller University. In 2006, Rachel Schnur, a biology major from Hillcrest who wanted to pursue cancer research and university teaching, was the college's Goldwater Scholar. She is in the PhD biomedical sciences program at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
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Don Gomez
Being of Service
Don Gomez, the Colin Powell Fellow 2008-2010, is a native of Queens. He graduated in 2000 from Martin Van Buren High School and joined the U.S. Army in 2001. He served with the famed 82nd Airborne Division for five years, and he deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 and in 2005.
His achievements in the U.S. Army include receiving the Joint Service Commendation Medal and the Combat Infantryman Badge and successfully graduating from Advanced Airborne School. He received his honorable discharge in 2006 and began attending college in Greensboro, N.C. In fall 2007, he transferred to City College, where he is pursuing a degree in international studies with a concentration in Middle East studies.
He is the vice president of the Student Association of International Studies. He also interns with the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, a nonprofit that seeks to minimize religiously fueled violence. He aspires to service with the U.S. government.
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Ryan Merola
Connecting with the Political Process
Brooklyn College student Ryan Merola, a junior in The City University of New York Honors College who is pursuing a double major in political science and philosophy, has won the prestigious Truman Scholarship. Merola, a 1999 graduate of Xaverian High School and third-generation Brooklyn College student, is one of only two New Yorkers to receive the scholarship in 2006.
The award, which provides up to $30,000 to students pursuing graduate degrees in public service fields, was announced today by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, president of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation. Seventy-five students from 63 American colleges and universities have been selected as 2006 Truman Scholars. This year, 598 students from 311 colleges and universities competed for the honors.
"The entire Brooklyn College community is extraordinarily proud of Ryan and his many accomplishments," said College President Christoph M. Kimmich. "His winning the Truman Scholarship reaffirms that Brooklyn College is a leading institution of higher learning that offers students every opportunity to achieve their academic and professional goals. This is a great day for Ryan and for Brooklyn College."
Merola has an abiding interest in public service, has served as an intern for Sen. Charles Schumer and a staff member for Congressman Edolphus Towns, and is active in Brooklyn's Independent Neighborhood Democrats. A member of Brooklyn College Student Government, he is also Brooklyn College's representative in the University Student Senate.
At Brooklyn College, which his grandmother, parents and numerous aunts and uncles attended, Merola has volunteered for the Center for the Study of Brooklyn and is working with fellow Honors Academy student Mary Pennisi and Professor Lillian O'Reilly to raise awareness about government resources available to the public on the Brooklyn College campus. Merola was also the youngest member selected to serve on the New York Daily News' "Voice of the People" panel, which commented on the 2004 elections.
Merola's prize comes a year after the success of Eugene Shenderov, '05, who won a 2005 Rhodes Scholarship and a grant from the National Institutes of Health to pursue cancer research at Oxford University. Following the example of students such as Shenderov who have won prestigious scholarships in recent years, Merola worked closely with the Brooklyn College Office of Scholarships during the application process. In preparing Merola for his final interviews for the scholarship, Evelyn Guzman, director of the Brooklyn College Scholarships Office, called upon alumnus Chief Justice Edward Korman, of the Eastern District of New York, who met with Merola and ran through a series of questions that might be asked in a typical interview.
"He was really impressive," Korman says, "both in his academic record and his commitment to public service."
After graduate school and law school, Merola aspires to a position he has coveted since high school -- that of Kings County assistant district attorney. Merola holds Kings County D.A. Charles J. Hynes in high regard, citing the work Hynes' office has done in community relations, drug and violent crime prevention and support for victims of domestic violence.
The Truman scholarships, given in memory of President Harry S Truman, were established in 1975 to recognize college juniors with exceptional leadership potential and to provide the financial support for study, leadership training and fellowship with like-minded young people who are committed to public service. Scholars receive priority admission and supplemental financial aid at some premier graduate institutions, leadership training, career and graduate school counseling and special internship opportunities within the federal government. Brooklyn College student Lisette Nieves, a philosophy and political science student who graduated in 1991, received a Truman Scholarship in 1990.
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Christine Curella
Taking a Global View
For the third consecutive year, a student from the Macaulay Honors College of The City University of New York was awarded a prestigious 2007 Harry S. Truman scholarship, the latest in a string of CUNY students who have been honored with national awards, including three 2007 Goldwater Scholarships and a 2007 Thurgood Marshall Scholarship.
Christine Curella, who investigated urban planning in China, Argentina, India and New York City as a Macaulay Honors College student at Hunter College, joins 2006 Truman winner Ryan Merola of the University's Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College and 2005 winner Claudio Simpkins of the Macaulay Honors College at City College who is attending Harvard Law School.
CUNY garnered five Truman finalists, including four Macaulay Honors College students, the most of any college or university in the nation. The University of Chicago and West Point placed four finalists apiece; Harvard, Annapolis, Stanford and Northwestern Universities had three apiece; and Yale and Princeton Universities had two.
The 2007 Truman Scholars were elected by 19 independent selection panels on the basis of leadership potential, intellectual ability and likelihood of "making a difference" in public service. Each Truman Scholarship provides $30,000 for graduate study.
Curella recently returned from a semester-long study abroad program in cities of Argentina, China and India, where she explored the inequities of urban development and the connections between local conditions and the global economy. After a summer-long internship in Africa and completing her senior thesis on environmental justice, she plans to pursue degrees in international affairs and urban planning to create diverse, equitable and inclusive communities around the world.
Curella's public service includes stints as a special assistant in the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, as an assistant to the chairman of the Erie County (N.Y.) Fiscal Stability Authority, at the NYC Department of City Planning as a special assistant in the executive office and with the Institute of International Education as a special assistant to the president. In 2003, she was named a "Rising Star" by Women's Day Magazine in its "Women Who Inspire Us" special edition. She has studied in Germany under the Bridge to Berlin program and in South Korea with Project Bridge to Korea.
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Claudio Simpkins
A Passion for Policy and Politics
Claudio Simpkins, a junior at the Macaulay Honors College at City College who is majoring in political science and philosophy, was named a 2005 Truman Scholar by the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation. The award carries a $30,000 scholarship to be applied toward graduate or professional studies.
"Winning a Truman Scholarship is a tremendous accomplishment, and I feel truly honored to have been selected," Simpkins said. "The award will help me further my passion for policy and politics by pursuing a PhD in American politics."
"This is a most deserving honor for a truly remarkable young man, and we couldn't be prouder of Claudio," said Gregory H. Williams, president of The City College of New York. "His accomplishment reinforces our belief that our students can play on the same field as the brightest students in America."
Simpkins credits City College with helping him develop communications and interpersonal skills that enabled him to excel in the Truman competition, which annually draws more than 600 applicants for 70 to 80 scholarships.
"City College's greatest asset is its diversity," he said. "In my three years here, I've met people with different backgrounds and viewpoints who I might not have otherwise met. The skills I learned related to and working with these people really helped during the interviews."
Simpkins is the third City College undergraduate or enrollee to win a major national scholarship competition. David Bauer, who will enroll at City College as a freshman next fall, won first place in the Intel Science Talent Search. And senior Lev Sviridov received a Rhodes Scholarship for a year of graduate study at Oxford University.
Simpkins, who is enrolled in City College's Herman Muehlstein Honors College and has a 3.8 GPA, lives in Ridgewood, Queens. A graduate of Grover Cleveland High School, he moved to New York from Charlotte, N.C., when he was 16.
The Truman Scholarships recognize college juniors with exceptional leadership potential who are committed to careers in government, the nonprofit or advocacy sectors, education or elsewhere in the public service. They provide financial support for graduate study, leadership training and fellowship with other students who are committed to making a difference through public service.
The Truman Scholarship Foundation was established in 1975 by an act of Congress as a living memorial to Harry S. Truman, the nation's 33rd president. The first scholarships were awarded for the 1977-78 academic year.
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Mitsy Chanel-Blot
An Anthropological View of Immigration
Hunter alumna Mitsy Chanel-Blot has received a 2008 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Chanel-Blot, a May 2007 anthropology major, is a doctoral student in social anthropology at the University of Texas-Austin.
Her research focus is the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Europe, examining the notions of exclusion and invisibility as it pertains to the Haitian diaspora in France, and the broader impact of immigration in Europe.
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program provides approximately 1,000 students with three years of funding -- up to $121,500 -- for research-focused master's and PhD degrees in the social and physical sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics.
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Joseph Hirsh
The Perfect Equation: Math = Abstract Art
For Joseph Hirsh, 21, who graduated summa cum laude from Queens College in December, the study of math is a lot like art appreciation.
"Although you can't hang an equation or a geometric principle on a wall and share it like a piece of art, there are wonderful moments of intense meditation and clarity that make math beautiful to pursue," he says.
Little wonder that four years ago Hirsh enrolled in the Macaulay Honors College at Queens College, where he went from a pre-med track to majoring in pure (i.e., abstract) mathematics. It was a decision he did not regret.
Hirsh has received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which will provide $121,500 over three years to support his graduate studies.
His experience at Queens College shaped his belief in public education in New York. In fact, Hirsh turned down the University of California, Berkeley choosing instead to enter the doctoral math program this fall at The City University of New York Graduate Center, where he will continue work that he began as an undergraduate.
Hirsh is also the recipient of the Molly Weinstein Memorial Award, presented annually by the Queens College Foundation to graduating seniors with a distinguished record of scholarship who intend to pursue a career in college teaching.
"Joseph Hirsh is in good company, as past recipients of this award have included two Nobel Prize winners and one of the founders of Google," says Queens College President James Muyskens. "A young man with extraordinary drive, determination and initiative, Joseph embodies all that we value most in our students. We fully expect him in the years ahead to make significant contributions to the nation's advancement in mathematics and science."
Hirsh, a Manhattan resident, grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island. He attended the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach, which combined religious study with a high school curriculum.
For the last year, Hirsh has been working at the Honors College as an Assistant Technology Fellow. In addition, he has been conducting research with math Professor John Terilla, trying to understand the relationships between complex algebraic theories and quantum field theory.
Hirsh also teaches introductory math and a course in calculus for business and social science students at Queens College. He has been invited by Professors Kefeng Liu (UCLA) and Shing Tung Yau (Harvard) to visit the Center for Mathematical Sciences at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, to study differential geometry and physics.
While Hirsh has not yet zeroed in on his future career — "it seems like a burden to project where I'll be in a few years" — he is certain that for now he wants to focus on math and research.
Hirsh says he is grateful to the Honors College and Queens College for the opportunity to take advantage of experiences such as spending a summer with a Beijing family while studying Mandarin Chinese. He was also able to take doctoral-level math courses and seminars at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Thanks to his professors, he attended Moduli Spaces of Curves: a Winter School and Conference at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany.
"CUNY offers a lot of resources. It's an outstanding place to learn provided you're motivated," says Hirsh. "The QC faculty are great in just about any area in which you have an interest. They are committed to the ideals of education and really care about and are accessible to their students."
In the same way that Hirsh was guided, he believes in helping his peers pursue opportunities to advance their education. During his first semester at Queens College, he persuaded the math department to offer an honors section in linear algebra. He also recruited 15 students for an advanced course in algebraic topology, which had not been taught at the college for more than 10 years. In his sophomore and junior years, Hirsh was a math tutor, specializing in more abstract subjects, including graduate-level algebra and topology. His incentive, he says, was the great pleasure he received in helping promising students — many of whom had full-time jobs and no money for private tutoring — succeed in math.
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Yisa Rumala
A Scientist at Heart
Top scientists make their mark early. By that standard, York College senior Yisa Rumala is right on schedule.
Rumala, a physics and math major who is graduating this spring at age 20, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He's in elite company. In 2006, 8,162 students applied to the program, which provides funding for three years of study; only 907 were offered fellowships. The stipend rate for 2006-2007 is $30,000.
Rumala will use his award to attend the University of Michigan, where he will pursue a PhD in applied physics. Like the National Science Foundation, the university found the incoming graduate student an impressive candidate — it awarded him a Rackham Science Award worth $1,850 monthly, plus tuition and fees, to support his first three years of studies.
A New York native, Rumala spent most of his childhood in Nigeria, where he lived with relatives and learned about his family's heritage. He traces his interest in science to that time.
"My uncle was an electrical engineer," he says. "He was always tweaking the computer and the television, and my hand was aching to touch something."
In 2002, Rumala returned to the city and matriculated at York College, where he earned numerous academic honors. His resume includes participation in summer research projects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University. As a McNair Scholar, he spent much of his senior year conducting experiments under the supervision of Assistant Professor of Physics Gregory Boutis, PhD.
"I'm impressed with Yisa's motivation," says Boutis. "He works extremely hard, which is what you need to pursue the sciences."
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Stephen Harris
A Biological Approach
Stephen Harris is a biology PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center specializing in ecology, evolutionary biology and behavior. After earning a BS from Ohio State University in 2006 in molecular genetics, he came to New York City as part of the New York City Teaching Fellows Program. From 2007 to 2009, he earned an MA in secondary science education from The City University of New York while teaching science in public schools around New York City.
After graduating, he joined the lab of Jason Munshi-South at Baruch College. He is interested in using genomic data to answer evolutionary questions and is studying the population genomics of the white-footed deer mouse. Specifically, he is interested in how urbanization in New York City may be leading to local adaptation in mice in city parks.
He is also a fellow with the National Science Foundation GK-12 program at CUNY and works at the High School for Environmental Studies setting up a sustainable research program where students use DNA barcoding to catalog biodiversity in New York City. Harris received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship award in 2011 and will use it to continue genomics research.
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Mark Barahman
Biomedical Magic
Mark Barahman, of the Macaulay Honors College at the College of Staten Island, is one of four CUNY juniors in 2011 to win highly competitive Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships, the premier federally funded undergraduate scholarship to encourage graduate study in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering.
The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, established by Congress, awarded 275 scholarships for the 2011-2012 academic year to U.S. sophomores and juniors. They were selected from a field of 1,095 mathematics, science and engineering students who were nominated by their colleges and universities.
Virtually all intend to earn a PhD. The one- and two-year scholarships cover tuition, fees, books and room and board up to $7,500 a year. Many Goldwater Scholars have gone on to win prestigious post-graduate fellowships, including 77 Rhodes Scholarships (including four in 2011), 108 Marshall Awards and 98 Churchill Scholarships.
Barahman, a biochemistry major and a Horace W. Goldsmith scholar, grew up in Israel, where as a teen he worked for an emergency medical organization. At the College of Staten Island, he worked first with Professor Abdeslem el Idrissi on neuroscience and now with chemistry Professor Alan Lyons on superhydrophobic (extremely water-repelling) surfaces. He constructed and programmed a 3-D printer now used by other researchers to fabricate surfaces with special properties. His professional aspirations include earning an MD/PhD in biomedical engineering.
He has presented his research in a variety of prestigious forums, including the 2010 SPIE Optics and Photonics Conference in San Diego. In March 2011, he and Lyons presented at the Young Chemists Committee ACS Symposium, titled "Printed Superhydrophobic Surfaces Exhibiting Slip-Angle Anisotropy." He was the only undergraduate at the symposium invited to present his research orally.
"Mark is a serious scientist who works very hard and thinks deeply about problems," Lyons says. "I expect that when he enters graduate school, he will rank amongst the top echelon of all graduate students."
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Joseph Cammarata
Making a Synthetic Biologist
Joseph Cammarata, of the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, is one of four CUNY juniors in 2011 to win highly competitive, Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships, the premier federally funded undergraduate scholarship to encourage graduate study in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering.
The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, established by Congress, awarded 275 scholarships for the 2011-2012 academic year to U.S. sophomores and juniors. They were selected from a field of 1,095 mathematics, science and engineering students who were nominated by their colleges and universities.
Virtually all intend to earn a PhD. The one- and two-year scholarships cover tuition, fees, books and room and board up to $7,500 a year. Many Goldwater Scholars have gone on to win prestigious post-graduate fellowships, including 77 Rhodes Scholarships (including four in 2011), 108 Marshall Awards and 98 Churchill Scholarships.
Cammarata, a junior majoring in biological sciences with a minor in chemistry, says he is "elated" and "incredibly grateful" to everyone who has helped him. He intends to pursue a PhD in synthetic biology and is assembling a college team for the annual iGEm synthetic biology competition.
He is off to a running start. Last summer, he was accepted into the 10-week Undergraduate Research Program at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and worked in the research lab of Zach Lippman.
He says this helped him to clarify and strengthen his motivation to pursue a career as a research scientist. "I learned not only a slew of new techniques but also acquired the discipline and confidence it takes to work independently," he says. "The time spent living with 25 other students in the program made it still clearer that a career in science was right for me."
He also has worked in the Hunter College research laboratory of biophotonics Professor Diana Bratu beginning in his first year. Bratu writes that "Joseph is the best junior undergraduate student I have ever worked with."
In fall 2010, he was accepted into the Howard Hughes Medical Institute undergraduate scholars program at Hunter, returning to the laboratory of Bratu.
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Johnson Ho
Insight into Neuropsychiatry
Johnson Shiuan-Jiun Ho, of Macaulay Honors College at City College, is one of four CUNY juniors in 2011 to win highly competitive Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships, the premier federally funded undergraduate scholarship to encourage graduate study in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering.
The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, established by Congress, awarded 275 scholarships for the 2011-2012 academic year to U.S. sophomores and juniors. They were selected from a field of 1,095 mathematics, science and engineering students who were nominated by their colleges and universities.
Virtually all intend to earn a PhD. The one- and two-year scholarships cover tuition, fees, books and room and board up to $7,500 a year. Many Goldwater Scholars have gone on to win prestigious post-graduate fellowships, including 77 Rhodes Scholarships (including four in 2011), 108 Marshall Awards and 98 Churchill Scholarships.
Majoring in biomedical engineering, Ho intends to improve clinical intervention in neuropsychiatric disorders. Since 2008, he has worked in Professor Marom Bikson's neural engineering laboratory. He is on a team that, in part, investigates mechanisms of electric field effects on synaptic plasticity in the rat motor cortex. He is named as a team member on two of Bikson's patent applications, one for a method of reducing discomfort during electrostimulation and the other for a method of neurocranial electrostimulation.
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Arthur Parzygnat
Quantum Field Theorist
Mathematician Arthur Jacob Parzygnat (Macaulay Honors College at Queens College, 2010), now exploring topological quantum field theory at the CUNY Graduate Center, is one of five CUNY students to win 2011 awards under the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. It is geared to assuring the vitality and diversity of America's scientific and engineering workforce.
Parzygnat, who describes himself as a mathematical physicist, received a $30,000 NSF grant payable over three years. He said his interest is in understanding quantum field theory (a description of our universe that occurs at the intersection of quantum mechanics and relativity) from a mathematically rigorous point of view.
Rather than working with Feynman path integrals, which physicists use extensively for computations, mathematicians look at the underlying structure of particle interactions. These seem to be best described by one-dimensional graphs, but analysis hasn't been developed for such objects. Therefore, most modern research involves a two- or higher-dimensional "tubed" version of these objects. Seeking a new pathway, Parzygnat will utilize topology, algebra and category theory to again consider one-dimensional versions.
If this sounds abstruse, it is. Are there practical payoffs? Perhaps, but the applications of many areas of mathematics have taken years to become evident.
Parzygnat veered into mathematics as a freshman thanks to the Macaulay Honors College, when he got advice on which math course to take from a Macaulay junior, Joseph Hirsch, who also is working toward his PhD in math at the Graduate Center (Parzygnat's doctorate will be in physics, possibly in 2015).
"He advised me to take an honors abstract algebra course. I didn't know what I was getting myself into," Parzygnat says. "It was too advanced for me, and I didn't do phenomenal, but I learned I wanted to go into math. I wanted a real challenge, and I knew I'd be in good company."
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Hendia Edmund
A Biomedicine Devotee
Hendia Raisa Edmund, Hunter College 2011, a biochemistry major, was one of 278 sophomores and juniors nationally to receive awards in 2010 from the congressionally founded Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation.
Edmund is a research assistant to Elion Endowed Scholar Dixie Goss, Hunter's chemistry chair, and has interned in Princeton University's department of molecular biology. She intends to pursue a PhD and research in biomedicine, particularly quorum sensing, which many bacteria use to detect and respond to extracellular signaling molecules.
This is the second consecutive year that a Hunter student has won the Goldwater, which covers tuition, fees, books and room and board up to $7,500 per year.
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Yitzchak Lockerman
Computer Whiz
Yitzchak Lockerman of Queens College was one of three CUNY students who won 2009 Goldwater scholarships, awarded by the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program established by Congress and named for the late Arizona senator.
The awards of $7,500 per year for one or two years go to students pursuing math, science or engineering to cover various college costs.
Lockerman, a computer science major, plans to conduct research in algorithm design.
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Itamar Belisha
Putting the Brain Under the Microscope
Itamar M. Belisha, a student at The City College of New York, has been selected as a 2007 Goldwater Scholar by the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation.
The Goldwater Scholarship, which is federally funded, is America's premier award for undergraduates majoring in math, science and engineering.
Belisha, a junior majoring in the electrical engineering, was among 317 undergraduates chosen nationwide. He was selected from a field of 1,110 mathematics, science and engineering students nominated by their schools. Scholars receive stipends of up to $7,500 per year toward tuition, fees, books and room and board.
Belisha, a native of Israel who lives in Brooklyn with his wife, has been investigating the correlation between high potassium and brain seizures during deep brain stimulation. His mentor is Marom Bikson, assistant professor of biomedical engineering. He has done research at the Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute as well.
"My motivation for combining engineering and medicine is the great potential I find in biomedical engineering to impact the quality of treatment for various neurological disorders by innovative techniques," he says.
Belisha plans to pursue a joint MD/PhD in biomedical engineering with the goal of conducting research on neurological disorders.
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Rachel Schnur
Looking for Answers
In 2006, Rachel Schnur, a biology major from Hillcrest who wanted to pursue cancer research and university teaching, was Queens College's Goldwater Scholar. She is in the PhD in biomedical sciences program at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
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Marcin Wisniewski
Discovering His Sounding Board
First there was Metallica, then a guitar, then classical music and now curiosity about the emerging field of sound therapy, which uses music and other sounds to heal the body. With a 2012 Hunter College master of arts in music performance degree in hand, Marcin Wisniewski will be off to Switzerland to study this new treatment medium, thanks to a U.S. Student Fulbright grant for the next academic year.
"This technique is not well known in the States," says Wisniewski, who also earned a bachelor of music degree from Hunter College in 2010. "It uses sound in a different way to effect a physical response, not just a psychological response, as with many other musical therapy interventions that are well known," he says.
The most widely publicized use of sound therapy is with tinnitus, the perception of ringing when there is no corresponding external source. An estimated one in five people aged 55 to 65 hear this ringing; the prime cause appears to be prolonged exposure to loud noise, from construction work to rock music heard via earphones.
Sound therapists contend that playing electronically filtered music can exercise the muscles of the inner ear and reopen pathways to the brain. Classical music's complex rhythms, melodies and harmonies can retrain the brain to a normal way of hearing, they say, adding that the right treatment with sound also can allay a variety of other ailments. Wisniewski will study sound therapy at a clinic in southern Switzerland.
"I'm not sure I will end up on this path, but music therapy interests me. It's such a new field," he says. "In any case, I wish to continue being a performer and a composer."
Wisniewski first picked up his brother's guitar at about 12, when he was into rock and metal and pretended he was playing. Then he found instructional information on the Web - "a lot harder to do before YouTube" - and began learning the instrument.
"By the time I was getting out of high school, I was playing two or three hours every day," he says, "but I had no idea I'd want to do music as a career."
Over time, he gravitated to increasingly complex music and "became interested in looking at music as an art, rather than something that's purely pleasing. I became interested in the beauty that complexity brings."
That drew him into classical guitar music, including the works of modern composers like Ástor Piazzolla, an Argentine who revolutionized traditional tango with jazz and classical music.
Born in Poland, Wisniewski emigrated to New York City with his family when he was a child. His brother earned an undergraduate degree in psychology from Hunter, where his mother also studied before earning a bachelor's in nursing at Adelphi University. As a result, Hunter became his prime destination for his undergraduate and master's work.
His Fulbright to Switzerland for the 2012-2013 academic year will bring him back to Europe, where he has wanted to return for an extended stay. "I'm going into this with an open mind and seeing where life takes me."
For Wisniewski's performance of a solo classical work, "Recuerdos de la Alhambra" by Francisco Tarrega, go to Link text
For his performance "Mumuki" by Ástor Piazzolla, go to Link text
For his performance of Piazzolla's "Primavera Portena," go to Link text
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Caley Johnson
2 Winners in 1 Year
Physical anthropology students Caley Johnson and Brian Shearer of the Graduate Center have received 2011 NSF Graduate Fellowships. They provide three years of student support over the next five years. There were only about 15 such awards in physical anthropology this year.
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Brian Shearer
2 Winners in 1 Year
Physical anthropology students Caley Johnson and Brian Shearer of the Graduate Center have received 2011 NSF Graduate Fellowships. They provide three years of student support over the next five years. There were only about 15 such awards in physical anthropology this year.
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Giovanni Milione
A Trio of Winning Students
Two City College of New York students and a recent graduate have won National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships to pursue search-based graduate study in the sciences. The 2011 award will provide $121,500 each over three years to graduating senior Anthony Pang, graduate student Giovanni Milione and alumna Evangeleen Pattison, '10.
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recognizes and supports exceptional students in science, technology, engineering or mathematics who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields. The award provides a $30,000 annual stipend and a $10,500 annual cost-of-education allowance. Fellows also gain international research and professional development opportunities and access to the TeraGrid Supercomputer for research analysis.
Pang, a mechanical engineering major who has done research in satellite design, among other areas, will follow his dreams to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for PhD studies in aeronautical and aerospace engineering in the fall. As a student in Professor Manuel Martinez-Sanchez's lab, he will research and develop plasma dynamic simulations for space thrusters.
He credits his undergraduate experience at City College for much of his success. "If you have the drive and the interest to innovate, you can really succeed on this campus," he says. "I followed all of my interests here."
Pang participated in projects involving robotics, biodiesel engine design, satellite thermal management and ice sheet modeling for Caltech/NASA. As a fellow with the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies, he also participated in a service project leading undergrads in teaching high school engineering classes and wrote a policy paper. He is the president of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering society on campus.
Milione, an Iraq War veteran and son of immigrants from Italy and Bolivia, is pursuing a master's degree in physics and mathematics at CCNY. He conducts research on singular optics and complex light with the Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers.
"There was something mysterious and elegant about both the physics and mathematics of light that captured my imagination," said Milione of his first exposure to optics, as an undergraduate at Stony Brook University.
In his research, Milione alters the structure of light, increasing the states of polarization, amplitude and phase within a beam to control it in time and space. The technique could be used to make spectroscopy incredibly sensitive or to grab small particles with light like a tractor beam. He will continue and expand on his research as a PhD student with Professor Robert Alfano.
Pattison, a sociology major who graduated magna cum laude last year, began investigating historical and current achievement gaps in higher education as an undergraduate at City College. At CCNY, she received undergraduate student paper awards from the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research and the Southern Demographic Association.
Pattison won the CCNY sociology department's Ward Medal in 2009 and was a City College Fellow and a Weston Fellow as an undergraduate. Now working toward a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, she is affiliated with that university's Population Research Center and conducts research to examine ways in which race/ethnicity and class influence educational inequalities.
She also examines educational pathways into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers, working with UT Professor Chandra Muller.
"If the United States is to maintain its position as a global leader, it is urgent to develop a more complete understanding of why underrepresented minorities depart from STEM," she says.
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Evangeleen Pattison
A Trio of Winning Students
Two City College of New York students and a recent graduate have won National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships to pursue search-based graduate study in the sciences. The 2011 award will provide $121,500 each over three years to graduating senior Anthony Pang, graduate student Giovanni Milione and alumna Evangeleen Pattison, '10.
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recognizes and supports exceptional students in science, technology, engineering or mathematics who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their fields. The award provides a $30,000 annual stipend and a $10,500 annual cost-of-education allowance. Fellows also gain international research and professional development opportunities and access to the TeraGrid Supercomputer for research analysis.
Pang, a mechanical engineering major who has done research in satellite design, among other areas, will follow his dreams to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for PhD studies in aeronautical and aerospace engineering in the fall. As a student in Professor Manuel Martinez-Sanchez's lab, he will research and develop plasma dynamic simulations for space thrusters.
He credits his undergraduate experience at City College for much of his success. "If you have the drive and the interest to innovate, you can really succeed on this campus," he says. "I followed all of my interests here."
Pang participated in projects involving robotics, biodiesel engine design, satellite thermal management and ice sheet modeling for Caltech/NASA. As a fellow with the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies, he also participated in a service project leading undergrads in teaching high school engineering classes and wrote a policy paper. He is the president of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering society on campus.
Milione, an Iraq War veteran and son of immigrants from Italy and Bolivia, is pursuing a master's degree in physics and mathematics at CCNY. He conducts research on singular optics and complex light with the Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers.
"There was something mysterious and elegant about both the physics and mathematics of light that captured my imagination," said Milione of his first exposure to optics, as an undergraduate at Stony Brook University.
In his research, Milione alters the structure of light, increasing the states of polarization, amplitude and phase within a beam to control it in time and space. The technique could be used to make spectroscopy incredibly sensitive or to grab small particles with light like a tractor beam. He will continue and expand on his research as a PhD student with Professor Robert Alfano.
Pattison, a sociology major who graduated magna cum laude last year, began investigating historical and current achievement gaps in higher education as an undergraduate at City College. At CCNY, she received undergraduate student paper awards from the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research and the Southern Demographic Association.
Pattison won the CCNY sociology department's Ward Medal in 2009 and was a City College Fellow and a Weston Fellow as an undergraduate. Now working toward a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, she is affiliated with that university's Population Research Center and conducts research to examine ways in which race/ethnicity and class influence educational inequalities.
She also examines educational pathways into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers, working with UT Professor Chandra Muller.
"If the United States is to maintain its position as a global leader, it is urgent to develop a more complete understanding of why underrepresented minorities depart from STEM," she says.
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Igor Labutov
Aces Covering All the Bases
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, which provide up to $121,500 to students for advanced study in mathematics and engineering; physical, biological, behavioral and certain social sciences and for research-based PhD degrees in science education, were awarded to four CUNY students for 2010-2013.
Igor Labutov, Macaulay Honors College 2010, will study engineering and systems engineering at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Andrea Marie Balbas, Queens College 2010, will go to the Oregon State University for study in the geosciences.
Joyce Kim, Hunter College 2009, is a first-year PhD student at Columbia University studying computer science. Interested in information security, she will be a research intern this summer at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center's Smarter Cloud Platform Group, focusing on cloud computing security.
Daniel Kulakowski is a biology PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. He will investigate the immunomodulatory activity of traditionally used Palauan plants and will study an important medicinal plant as a potential adjuvant in cancer vaccine treatment.
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Andrea Balbas
Aces Covering All the Bases
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, which provide up to $121,500 to students for advanced study in mathematics and engineering; physical, biological, behavioral and certain social sciences and for research-based PhD degrees in science education, were awarded to four CUNY students for 2010-2013.
Igor Labutov, Macaulay Honors College 2010, will study engineering and systems engineering at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Andrea Marie Balbas, Queens College 2010, will go to the Oregon State University for study in the geosciences.
Joyce Kim, Hunter College 2009, is a first-year PhD student at Columbia University studying computer science. Interested in information security, she will be a research intern this summer at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center's Smarter Cloud Platform Group, focusing on cloud computing security.
Daniel Kulakowski is a biology PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. He will investigate the immunomodulatory activity of traditionally used Palauan plants and will study an important medicinal plant as a potential adjuvant in cancer vaccine treatment.
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Joyce Kim
Aces Covering All the Bases
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, which provide up to $121,500 to students for advanced study in mathematics and engineering; physical, biological, behavioral and certain social sciences and for research-based PhD degrees in science education, were awarded to four CUNY students for 2010-2013.
Igor Labutov, Macaulay Honors College 2010, will study engineering and systems engineering at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Andrea Marie Balbas, Queens College 2010, will go to the Oregon State University for study in the geosciences.
Joyce Kim, Hunter College 2009, is a first-year PhD student at Columbia University studying computer science. Interested in information security, she will be a research intern this summer at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center's Smarter Cloud Platform Group, focusing on cloud computing security.
Daniel Kulakowski is a biology PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. He will investigate the immunomodulatory activity of traditionally used Palauan plants and will study an important medicinal plant as a potential adjuvant in cancer vaccine treatment.
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Daniel Kulakowski
Aces Covering All the Bases
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, which provide up to $121,500 to students for advanced study in mathematics and engineering; physical, biological, behavioral and certain social sciences and for research-based PhD degrees in science education, were awarded to four CUNY students for 2010-2013.
Igor Labutov, Macaulay Honors College 2010, will study engineering and systems engineering at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Andrea Marie Balbas, Queens College 2010, will go to the Oregon State University for study in the geosciences.
Joyce Kim, Hunter College 2009, is a first-year PhD student at Columbia University studying computer science. Interested in information security, she will be a research intern this summer at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center's Smarter Cloud Platform Group, focusing on cloud computing security.
Daniel Kulakowski is a biology PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. He will investigate the immunomodulatory activity of traditionally used Palauan plants and will study an important medicinal plant as a potential adjuvant in cancer vaccine treatment.
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Amy Colon
High Five for CUNY
Five CUNY students are among 2009's first National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows (this year's awards are being announced in installments because of "the complexity of the current budget situation," the agency said).
Initial winners are: Amy Colon, Hunter College, astrophysics; Chivon Powers, Brooklyn College, cognitive psychology; Christopher Negron, City College, life sciences; and Je Hi An and David L.V. Bauer, who are specializing in bioengineering and biomedical research at Macaulay Honors College at City College.
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Chivon Powers
High Five for CUNY
Five CUNY students are among 2009's first National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows (this year's awards are being announced in installments because of "the complexity of the current budget situation," the agency said).
Initial winners are: Amy Colon, Hunter College, astrophysics; Chivon Powers, Brooklyn College, cognitive psychology; Christopher Negron, City College, life sciences; and Je Hi An and David L.V. Bauer, who are specializing in bioengineering and biomedical research at Macaulay Honors College at City College.
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Christopher Negron
High Five for CUNY
Five CUNY students are among 2009's first National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows (this year's awards are being announced in installments because of "the complexity of the current budget situation," the agency said).
Initial winners are: Amy Colon, Hunter College, astrophysics; Chivon Powers, Brooklyn College, cognitive psychology; Christopher Negron, City College, life sciences; and Je Hi An and David L.V. Bauer, who are specializing in bioengineering and biomedical research at Macaulay Honors College at City College.
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Je An
High Five for CUNY
Five CUNY students are among 2009's first National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows (this year's awards are being announced in installments because of "the complexity of the current budget situation," the agency said).
Initial winners are: Amy Colon, Hunter College, astrophysics; Chivon Powers, Brooklyn College, cognitive psychology; Christopher Negron, City College, life sciences; and Je Hi An and David L.V. Bauer, who are specializing in bioengineering and biomedical research at Macaulay Honors College at City College.
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James Faghmous
Focusing on Computer Science
James Faghmous, who earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from The City College of New York in 2006, has been awarded a 2007 National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.
He transferred to City College from Ingénieur d'Etat, Université des Sciences et de la Technologie Houari Boumediène in Algeria in 2003 and earned a PhD in computer science from The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 2011.
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Moses Feaster
From Battlefield to Research Lab
The National Science Foundation has announced that Moses Feaster, a Brooklyn College senior majoring in biology, has been awarded a three-year NSF graduate fellowship to pursue a PhD in developmental biology at Rockefeller University.
Feaster, 24, is a member of the College's Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) program. He is the only student from The City University of New York to receive the fellowship this year, although four students in CUNY qualified for honorable mentions, including Brooklyn College chemistry major Aaron T. Frank, also a MARC student.
A transfer student from the University of Virginia, Feaster enrolled in Brooklyn College in fall 2002, but his first year was cut short. Feaster, a corporal in the Marine Corps Reserve, was deployed to Iraq in support of Operations Enduring/Iraqi Freedom on Jan. 29, 2003, with the 6th Communications Battalion, based in Brooklyn's Floyd Bennett Field. He was attached to a British communications unit and traveled as far north as Basra, working to establish secure data communication between U.S. and British units during the war.
Feaster began his undergraduate research career upon returning to Brooklyn in fall 2003. As a research assistant in the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, he worked with Jennifer Basil of Brooklyn College's Biology Department, investigating memory formation in freshwater crayfish. With the help of MARC director and Dean of Research and Graduate Studies Louise Hainline, Feaster participated in a Leadership Alliance Early Identification Program summer internship at Columbia University's Department of Genetics and Development. Working with Virginia Papaioannou, he investigated the role of the gene Tbx6 in the development of the mouse embryo.
In 2005, Feaster was again accepted into a summer research program, working in the developmental biology program at the Sloan-Kettering Institute. In addition to the summer program, Feaster is a part of a yearlong research component at Sloan-Kettering, supported by a grant from the National Cancer Institute. Working in the laboratory of Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis, Feaster is trying to identify proteins that interact with the Tbx6 transcription factor.
Feaster's NSF Graduate Research Fellowship offers three years of support over a five-year period for advanced study and includes an annual stipend of $30,000. It is awarded annually to approximately 900 outstanding students in chemistry, computer information science, engineering, geosciences, life sciences, mathematical sciences, physics and astronomy, psychology and the social sciences.
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Wanmei Ou
Engineering Computer Science
Wanmei Ou, who graduated summa cum laude and was the salutatorian of the Class of 2003 at City College, won a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2005.
Ou has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from City Collge and master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.
A graduate research assistant at MIT, Ou is interested in signal detection, machine learning and computer vision.
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Lisette Nieves
Community Minded
Lisette Nieves was a 1992 Rhodes Scholar and the first Puerto Rican to receive the prestigious award. A 1991 philosophy and political science graduate of Brooklyn College, she also won a Truman Scholarship and is a graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University.
Nieves is the founding executive director, New York City, of Year Up, whose mission is to provide urban young adults with the skills, experience and support that will empower them to reach their potential through professional careers and higher education. She has been a graduate instructor in public administration at Brooklyn College and held a number of leadership positions in government and the nonprofit community, focusing on youth services. Nieves has also served as a consultant to nonprofit organizations in strategic planning, program development and management. In 2008, the Robin Hood Foundation awarded her a Heroes Award.
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Raymond Paretzky
Laying Down the Law
Raymond Paretzky, a lawyer in private practice in Washington, D.C., was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1983. He is a summa cum laude Queens College graduate who majored in English and minored in French.
While at Queens College, Paretzky was active in the student-faculty senate, serving as vice president of the Student Association. He was editor of the Jewish newspaper Ha-Or and was involved in other campus Jewish organizations.
Paretzky spent two years at Oxford University studying English language and literature. After returning to the United States, he went to Yale Law School, where he was articles editor of the Yale Journal of International Law. After graduation from Yale Law School, Paretzky was a law clerk to a U.S. district court judge for the District of Massachusetts and then settled in Washington, D.C. His law practice focuses on international trade law, and Paretzky has extensive experience handling complex international trade matters for U.S. and foreign clients.
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Robert Molloy
CUNY's 1939 Star
Robert T. Molloy, a 1938 magna cum laude graduate of The City College of New York, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1939. He received his degree in history with honors.
The son of a rear admiral assigned to the U.S. Coast Guard, he attended schools in various cities where his father was stationed and graduated from a New York City public high school. At City College, he received Second Year Honors, was chosen as a Naumberg Fellow and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Molloy matriculated at Oxford University as a candidate for an A.B. in Jurisprudence. He also studied for the advanced degree of bachelor of civil law. When Molloy returned to the United States, he went to Yale Law School, receiving his LL.B. in 1941.
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Jasmine Osorio
Jasmine Osorio, who earned a mathematics degree at York College in 2012, was born in reared in the Bronx, New York and came to York College to pursue a degree in mathematics education. She has presented her undergraduate research "Investigating the Use of Volatility and Derivatives to Hedge Portfolios" at York, at two national conferences in San Diego and at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston. She came to York on a full Teacher Academy Scholarship with full tuition and stipend and is also a Harcourt Fellow.
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Tony Wan
York College Valedictorian Is Iraq War Veteran
Tony Wan, York College's 2012 valedictorian, served two tours of duty in Iraq as a U.S. Marine. There will be at least seven other veterans graduating with him.
Wan, who was born in Belize to Chinese immigrants, came to the United States when he was 3. As one of York's undergraduate researchers, he wanted to get his degree in three years and move on to medical school since his military service had deferred his college dream by four years. He is the first member of his family to go to college.
At 25, Wan, a chemistry major, is graduating with a 3.99 grade point average and says York's professors and counselors have been a key to his academic success.
"I came here for the physician assistant program," he says. "While I was still in the military, I came home to check out schools. I went to St. John's and to York, and when I got to York, the first person I saw was Dr. Emmanuel Chang. He was doing something else, and he dropped that to help me. I knew this was where I wanted to be."
And it has served him well.
"It's ironic," says Wan, who graduated from Benjamin Cardozo High School in Bayside, Queens. "It took me three tries to pass chemistry in high school, and now I will be applying to medical school after majoring in chemistry at York."
Wan is partial to the medical programs at SUNY Downstate Medical and Stony Brook University. Though he bears no physical evidence of his Iraq experience, he says he did sustain concussions and that such injuries can manifest themselves in potentially fatal ways later on.
He plans to pursue a concentration in neurology to help veterans and others with neurological disorders. His war experience included the loss one of his best friends. It was then that he promised "not to let any more Marines die on my watch."
To this end, he sometimes got out of the convoy and walked on his hands and knees looking for explosives in the path. Wan has come full circle. He joined the Marines, where he reached the rank of corporal, to fund his college education because he didn't want to burden his parents with paying for two children's education.
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George Vourderis
Finding Himself in Translation
Pumped after an evening's work as a student ambassador at the USA pavilion at the Living Ocean and Coast Expo in Yeosu, Korea, George Vourderis is right where he wants to be. And when the 104-nation exposition ends in August, he'll still be there, spending the academic year researching Korea's increasingly multi-ethnic population under a Fulbright fellowship.
"There's an influx of people coming to Korea from Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia especially and the Middle East," Vourderis (Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College and CUNY BA in Iberian literary and cultural studies and East Asian studies, 2012) says. "They come because the Korean government gives grants to students from developing countries. They learn the language and a lot stay here, going to work in Korean businesses or starting their own businesses. That is creating a multicultural phenomenon that is changing the face of Korea."
An exchange student there not so long ago, Vourderis has an affinity for languages. A third-generation Greek-American, he attended a full-time Greek elementary and middle school in Bayside, Queens, before going to Townsend Harris High School, where he focused on Spanish, classical Greek and modern Greek.
In eighth grade, he made friends with some Koreans he met at a mall. "My best friend in high school was Korean, so I taught myself to read and write Korean from a book, and one thing led to another," he says.
In his junior year of high school, the Korea Society gave him a two-week scholarship to go to Korea on the Project Bridge program.
No CUNY college has a Korean studies department, but some campuses do offer courses in the language. Vourderis tapped into those resources through the CUNY BA program and honed his language skills as an intern at the Korea Society. He studied at Yonsei University in Seoul during his junior year of college. He turned it into nearly a year of full-time language study with the help of the CUNY BA program and Macaulay's Opportunities Fund, which awards each Macaulay student $7,500 for external educational activities.
Macaulay and the CUNY BA advisors also helped him tailor his Fulbright application. "They opened you up to the world of scholarships," he says. "Everyone in both offices is amazing."
In his off hours in Seoul, he volunteered as a translator at Severance Hospital, where he encountered Korean patients who lived in Latin America. Many Koreans had emigrated there to open factories and businesses, just as they did in the United States; their children grew up with Spanish as their first language.
"People used to kid me for learning two languages that have nothing to do with each other, but it has been very useful," Vourderis says. "The other day at the expo, the CEO of the Mexican pavilion came by with his translator, and I was able to speak to him in Spanish and to the translator in Korean. There are not many people at different pavilions who can do that."
During his Fulbright year, he intends to also volunteer at the Seoul Global Center, which the city's mayor set up to help people settle in Korea. It offers translation help in more than 20 languages.
Vourderis foresees a career in the Foreign Service. "I like interacting with people, and foreign-service work is very hands-on," he says.
Knowing Korean should be a plus, for the State Department lists it as a critical language, along with Arabic and Chinese. He also took two years of Chinese at Hunter and wants to continue studying it.
After his Fulbright year, he may go to graduate school, such as at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, whose graduates populate the Foreign Service, other government agencies and international banking and business.
And long-term, he'd like to work in Greece, which he has frequently visited during summers and where some of his family lives.
"I love it in Korea, but what's happening in Greece [as its economy disintegrates] tears my heart," he says. "One person can't change a whole country's economy, but it would make me very happy to do something to alleviate the pain."
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Gil Agassi
Taking Culture at Face Value
Stereotypes, as Gil Agassi sees them, are part of the cultural fabric of a people. "People tend to think that the world they see is objective, that they're seeing the true reality," says Agassi (Brooklyn College, BS in psychology, 2012). "But we're never seeing true reality. It's always a reality that's influenced by the place you're in and the people you're with."
Cultures create their own realities, he says. For example, the cultural traditions of China and Judaism, such as respect for education and reverence for traditions and ancestors, intersect at several key points. This led to the traditionally favorable view of the Jew in China, which dates from Silk Road traders going back at least to the Song Dynasty (960-1127).
Agassi explored the story of the Jews in China in an independent research course during his senior year with psychology Professor Elisabeth Brauner. He looked at how Jews achieved almost mythic status in the Chinese cultural mind, even though there never was more than a tiny community of Jewish traders, most likely from India or Persia. They made their home and intermarried in Kaifeng, in China's central province of Henan. Over time, they were deemed ethnically Chinese by the Chinese government. A thousand years later, an exceedingly small number of descendants, who identify themselves as ethnically Jewish, survive in that city.
In the fall, with a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship, Agassi will shift his focus to Israel, which he has visited as a tourist. "This is not just teaching English but a cultural exchange," he says. "I'll be teaching Israelis about American history and doing some volunteer work, so I can reach a broad spectrum of people, and I'll bring understanding back to America about them, as well."
He anticipates that this experience will more sharply define his plans to become a cultural and a clinical psychologist.
Cultural exchange was a part of Agassi's experience at Brooklyn College. Through organizations like Hillel and the Israel clubs, he helped organize events that helped students – Jewish, Christian, Muslim and others – to better understand Judaism and Jewish thought.
"From what I've learned and experienced, I believe that culture influences the lives of individuals and groups and how they perceive things," Agassi says. "As a therapist, I can't impose on a patient my perception of right and wrong; that comes from the culture he or she is from. For example, in Western culture, we promote the individual and independence, while in many parts of the world the group is promoted over the individual. If I'm dealing with a person from another culture, I can't tell them they're too dependent on someone else; for them and their culture, their interdependence is healthy."
Agassi sees the Fulbright as an extension of that cultural exchange. "I'm now going from my own culture to a Middle Eastern culture in Israel, where people have different attitudes even about everyday interactions. For example, how they greet each other is different. They say 'salaam' or 'shalom,' which both mean 'peace,' as well as 'hello.' I think this experience will broaden my perspective," he says.
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Erica Leong
Learning the Lingo
There are many reasons Erica Leong applied for a Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship to teach English in South Korea. Gaining empathy for her future English as a Second Language (ESL) students ranks high among them.
"I wanted to go into a society or country where everything is foreign, so I can say to my future students, 'I've been in your situation, not knowing the language or the culture,'" she says. "It will make for more credibility as an ESL teacher."
Not that she hasn't been introduced to the Korean language. She had a semester at Queens College, from which she graduated, cum laude, in spring 2012 with a BA in English. From that small launch pad, she's ready to vault into a six-week orientation with four hours of Korean every morning and the added boost she'll get from living with a host family.
"I was born in America and grew up on Long Island," she says. "My mom speaks Cantonese, so I can do conversational Cantonese." Chinese languages share roots with Korean, so there's the hope of something familiar to latch onto.
One of Leong's professors, David Leventhal, had suggested that she consider a career in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). After gaining TESOL certification, she began teaching English to Chinese immigrants at a Chinatown YMCA through Pace University's AmeriCorps program. She had visited Chinatown during childhood for church and recreation, but teaching there gave her a new perspective.
"You see the situation where people confront a language barrier; they're either put down or treated negatively," she says. "I want to minimize that because in America, you have to know English for everything."
Because the AmeriCorps program was tuition-free, "the students really wanted to be there. I felt really good when they asked me for help with real-life questions. One asked for help with an insurance form. Someone asked me to call about jury duty service because when they called, the person at the other end was talking too fast. One asked me to do a mock interview to prepare her to apply for a nursing position. They trusted me enough to ask me these things, and that makes me very happy. It's a class to learn English, but they know this is essential to their lives."
If things work out well in South Korea, Leong may seek to renew the Fulbright Fellowship for a year or two, but there's another option: the Peace Corps. "AmeriCorps allowed me to help a high-need community at home," she says. "The Peace Corps would allow me to do that internationally."
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Daniel Feldman
Reaching for the Stars
College of Staten Island salutatorian Daniel Feldman plans to begin studying astronomy at Boston University as a Ph.D. student in the fall. He is a physics major and part of the 2012 graduating class of the CUNY Macaulay Honors College at CSI.
During his undergraduate studies, Feldman took part in numerous research projects. Starting the summer after his freshman year (2009), he conducted galaxy evolution research as part of a team at the American Museum of Natural History under the advisement of CSI Professor Charles Liu. He presented this work at the 215th American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C.
During 2010, Feldman participated in two research projects at CSI that were overseen by Professor Irving Robbins. The first was an asteroid-tracking project, determining the positions and trajectories of high-priority asteroids using data from Tenagra Observatory in Arizona. The second involved helping to build a radio antenna to track solar flares; this work was done as part of the SID collaboration, which was run at Stanford University.
In the summer of 2010, Feldman was selected to participate in the CUNY Summer Undergraduate Research Program, where he worked with Professor Kelle Cruz at Hunter College and the American Museum of Natural History, studying youth indicators in M dwarf stars. He continued this research through the following year, and it resulted in numerous research presentations, including the Astronomical Society of New York conference at the University of Rochester and the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Wash.
In the summer of 2011, Feldman was selected to participate in the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at Northern Arizona University, studying Kuiper Belt Objects. This research resulted in presentations at Columbia University's AstroFest and the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas.
In his last year at CSI, Feldman has been working on his senior thesis with Professor Emily Rice, as well as collaborators in the BDNYC research group at the American Museum of Natural History; he has been using high-resolution near-infrared spectroscopy techniques to help determine the physical properties of brown dwarfs.
In addition to research, Feldman has been active in developing his teaching skills. Since his freshman year, he has been a physics and calculus tutor for the Macaulay Honors College. Beginning in his junior year, he also has been employed at the college as an adjunct college lab technician for the astronomy labs. He also has done outreach at CSI's astrophysical observatory, helping teach the public about astronomy.
A graduate of Port Richmond High School, Feldman has a passion for music and theater. As hobbies, he enjoys playing numerous musical instruments as well as performing as a singer/actor in musical theater productions in various venues on Staten Island. It is his hope to continue to pursue these scientific and artistic passions after graduation and become successful in these different aspects of his life.
In fall 2012, Feldman will begin studying astronomy at Boston University as a PhD student and has aspirations of becoming a professor at a research institution.
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Nicolas Montano
Nicolas Montano, CUNY BA in international criminology and juvenile delinquent psychology 2013, was one of 40 students selected nationally to participate in the summer 2012 Harvard Latino Leadership Initiative.
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Diane Kolack
Food for Thought
Diane Kolack, a 2012 grad, came to CUNY Baccalaureate with nine years of working and volunteering in the areas of sustainable food, law and politics. She holds a certificate in holistic health and nutrition, has taught cooking from a natural foods perspective, has studied the psychology of food and the diets of different cultures and regions and has an interfaith seminary education that influences the way she thinks of social justice issues.
In CUNY Baccalaureate, she studied the social, economic, cultural and psychological factors that have influenced food consumption practices and patterns, as well as the environmental, ethical and economic factors in food production and distribution.
Concurrent with her seminary studies, she founded the Sunnyside Community Agriculture group, eatwellguide.org/i.php?id=spotlight_sunnysidecsa, which supports organic farmers on Long Island. She is also a member of a group of community leaders and other CUNY students developing the Queens Harvest Food Co-op, queensharvestcoop.com, near the largest public housing development in the city, which lacks supermarkets and high-quality food at affordable prices.
Kolack hopes to leverage her degree in a position in the public or private sector, working to improve the food system for everyone.
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Robin Roberts
Planetary Ambitions
Robin Roberts, bachelor's degree in hand, is a student in the PhD program in physics at the CUNY Graduate Center as a CUNY Science Scholar (full tuition and stipend support).
But in 1995, although a senior, she had to drop out of college (Wake Forest University in North Carolina, where she was a biology major), because of financial restraints; at the time, she was sure she was leaving school forever. She got a job as a field scientist. In a meteoric rise, she was promoted from lab technician to bench scientist to assay specialist (a position created for her) to head biologist-lead bench technician at a nationally known brand's research and development biosciences department.
Buoyed by her success, she returned to school, City College, in 2006, entering CUNY Baccalaureate half a year later. She graduated in September 2011. Only now her interests were no longer in biology, they were in space science – she wanted a career as an astrophysicist.
"I want to study planets, but not our own familiar set; rather, I want to discover and study habitable planets like the Earth, to find such planets from remote distances and, ultimately, how to get to them," she says. "Also, I find the more exposed I am to quantum mechanics and the study of black holes, the more I find I am drawn to them. I would love a position at NASA, a NASA contractor, or a research institution such as a planetarium or observatory."
In the summer of 2007, Roberts became an intern at the American Museum of Natural History. For the fall 2008 semester, she was able to capitalize on her work there to create an independent study in planetary studies that, among other things, involved creating a gravitational-specific simulation project, a "stepping stone" she says to the kind of work she hopes to do on the graduate level. Then, spurred by her research advisor to explore other research and funding opportunities, she was accepted for a nationally competitive paid internship through the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, which gave her the opportunity to work with a groundbreaking team at the museum. This was the first time that two CUNY students made the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates roster.
In fall 2007, Roberts was selected as a Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellow by CUNY Baccalaureate; the fellowship allowed her to move from part-time to full-time studies. In recommending her for the Smith Fellowship, Prof. Charles Liu, astrophysics, College of Staten Island, described Roberts as "intelligent, enthusiastic and highly motivated; she is making a serious run for a degree in space science and a research career in astronomy and astrophysics, and she will make scholarly contributions to the field."
After two semesters of research at the American Museum of Natural History, Roberts was offered a full-time position as a research assistant. About her readiness for this position, she said, "I am thrilled at the prospect of doing what most undergraduates can only dream about. By allowing me to create my own degree structure, my coursework has prepared me for this opportunity."
She has worked on a number of projects, including Project 1640, installed at the Palomar Observatory in California, and the Gemini Planet Imager, where she operated and collected data on the experimental testbed in the museum's Astrophysics Laboratory/ Instrumentation Clean Room; the testbed was installed at an observatory in Chile in January 2010. In 2009, Roberts became a sub-advisor for other students who were chosen for the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates positions.
For her concentrations, Roberts took undergraduate and graduate courses at City, Hunter and CUNY's School of Professional Studies. Roberts has been mentored by Prof. Alexios Polychronakos, deputy chair, Physics Department, City College, and deputy executive officer, physics, CUNY Graduate Center.
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Khalsa Sant Mukh
Sant Mukh Khalsa has been accepted to the PhD program in anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center with an Enhanced Chancellor's Fellowship that provides five years of support, plus tuition.
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Daniel Kennedy
Daniel Kennedy
Daniel Kennedy, B.S. June 2011, has been accepted to Clare College of Cambridge University for an M.Phil. degree in arts, culture and education on a scholarship funded by The Cambridge Commonwealth Trust and the Cambridge Overseas Trust.
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Benjamin Rudshteyn
Searching for the Origins of Life
Could sulfur-based chemicals have formed the basis of life, if not on Earth, then perhaps on other planets?
"The big question is: Where did biological chemicals come from, and what are the boundaries for what constitutes biological chemicals?" asks Benjamin Rudshteyn (Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College, 2013), who won a 2012 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. This is the premier federally funded undergraduate scholarship to encourage study in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering.
Congress established the highly competitive scholarship for U.S. sophomores and juniors, virtually all of whom intend to earn a PhD. No college can nominate more than four students, and only about 300 scholarships are awarded annually nationwide. The one- and two-year grants cover tuition, fees, books and room and board up to $7,500 a year. As a junior, Rudshteyn will get one year of support.
Rudshteyn's PhD will be in theoretical chemistry "or some variant of it." As for a career, he says, "I like teaching, I like research, so being an academic professor may be a good fit."
His undergraduate research is about as theoretical as it gets. "Reduced sulfur was in abundance in prebiotic Earth, but molecular oxygen was not," he says. "Oxygen initially was tied up in geological molecules, which had to be released to give birth to life as we know it. Sulfur-rich atmospheres exist on other planets and moons, like Jupiter's moon Io. That makes one wonder about whether life exists elsewhere, based on sulfur-based chemical reactions that occur in the extreme sulfur-rich conditions that existed when Earth was young."
Working with his Brooklyn College mentor, Chemistry Professor Alexander Greer, he ran computer simulations at the CUNY High Performance Computing Center at the College of Staten Island. The center makes state-of-the-art supercomputing resources and expert technical assistance available to faculty and students from throughout CUNY.
Rudshteyn's simulations produced hypothetical polydisulfide helices (spiral strands) that, he calculated, could be precursors to components resembling amino acids, the building blocks of life. This led to his principal-authorship of the article "Theoretical Study of a Nonpeptidic Polydisulfide Alpha-Helix" that will appear in the Journal of Sulfur Chemistry. The coauthors were PhD student Alvaro Castillo and Greer.
"I think, like Darwin, that life came randomly out of a pond when there were a lot of volatile gases and chemicals, and lightening came at the right moment to create amino acids," he says. "All the other biochemicals came from there."
Figuring out how chemicals give life on other planetary bodies requires 21st-century tools. "We can't get samples from prehistoric earth, except maybe from ice, and we can't get chemicals easily from other planets, so simulating on computers is what we can do," he says.
Rudshteyn also has been working on Greer's investigation of photodynamic therapy, an emerging technology for treating cancer. Some tumors can't be surgically removed or are placed where radiation would damage surrounding tissue. Photodynamic therapy, as the National Cancer Institute explains it, combines a drug called a photosensitizing agent with a specific wavelength of light from a laser or other source; perhaps delivered inside the body via a fiber optic cable, the light triggers production of an active form of oxygen that kills nearby cells.
"My job is to simulate the step where excited oxygen reacts with drug molecules and see if it would work," Rudshteyn says. "They're still working on the experimental side, but my computer work helps provide a proof of concept in a scaled-down version."
Rudshteyn was born in Brooklyn to a family who were trained as engineers (his mother in civil engineering, his father in mechanical engineering) in Belarus, when it was part of the Soviet Union. His father, Alex Rudshteyn, earned a master's degree in computer and information science at Brooklyn College in 1998 and is the college's associate director of Academic IT and Library Systems. His mother, Anna Rozenbaum, earned a master's degree in health and nutrition science at Brooklyn College in 1997 and works as a dietitian.
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Vladislav Davidzon
Vladslav Davidzon, B.A. 2009 (Russian Literature / Intellectual History), has been accepted to the naster's in Human Rights at European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation, in Venice, Italy. You can read Vladislav's blog at http://www.tabletmag.com/author/vdavidzon
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Philip Liu
A Large 'Small' Project
Moore's Law predicts that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits will double every year (later revised to 18 months), and it has held true ever since Intel cofounder Gordon Moore announced it in 1965.
But as microelectronics researchers try to pack more and more circuits into increasingly tiny packages, they're colliding with the peculiar physics that take place on the nanoscale. When things get exceedingly small, the risk of short-circuiting soars and the very flow of electrons makes them too hot to function.
Philip Liu (Macaulay Honors College at City College, B.E. in chemical engineering, 2012) intends to pursue a solution thanks to a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This $126,000 three-year grant is the most prestigious award for graduate research in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
Guided by two professors in the chemical engineering doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin, Liu is working to create a material that will insulate electrical circuits and conduct heat efficiently away from them - two seemingly incompatible functions that have never been combined before. He hopes to do this with a polymer composite, which would enable more silicon chips to be stacked upon one another than is now possible. And that would allow adherence to Moore's Law.
"My first project is to synthesize boron nitride nanotubes, which are long skinny tubes with nanometer diameters," Liu says. (A nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter; a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide. Boron nitride is a chemical that is electrically insulating and heat conducting.) But, he explains, the method used so far to create boron nitride nanotubes yields few tubes: brute-force fragmenting chunks of the material. So Liu's initial hurdle is to come up with a more elegant and efficient manufacturing process.
"The next step would be to functionalize the nanotubes by attaching organic functional groups such as ketones or alcohols, which will serve as sites where we can attach long-chain polymers," he says.
The functionalized nanotubes would then be dispersed in a polymer, which would latch onto the nanotubes in the designated places. That would form a composite that would have high heat conductivity and would electrically insulate the tiny copper wires that run vertically between stacked silicon integrated circuits.
Liu decided to pursue this project after hearing a presentation at the University of Texas by C. Grant Willson, who holds the Rashid Engineering Regents Chair. He also studies with Brian Korgel, the Matthew Van Winkle Regents Professor of Chemical Engineering.
"I work with Doctor Korgel, who has the equipment and knowledge to make the nanomaterials, and with Doctor Wilson to incorporate these materials into commercially viable products," he says.
Liu switched into this project after having worked on batteries at CUNY's Energy Institute at City College.
"I worked on zinc batteries, trying to understand the morphologies of dendrites that form when they are charged," he says. Dendrites are crystallized minerals that collect on battery terminals and eventually interfere with their functioning. "The experience inspired me to pursue research, because you tinker with novel ideas and apply them."
As an undergraduate, Liu had an NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates at Columbia University, where he worked with mechanical engineering associate professor Chee Wei Wong on modeling nanoparticles and determining their influence on the optical properties of thin films. He also worked on artificial eye research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory one summer; his tasks included preparing electrodes that would carry images from the artificial eye into the subjects' brains.
Liu intends to work in industry after earning his doctorate.
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Robert Riggs
Unlocking Ex-Inmates' Social Ties
It seems logical to assume that people who come out of prison and build strong social networks are more likely to stay out of prison than those whose social ties are weak, but what makes a strong social network?
Robert Riggs (CUNY B.A., summa cum laude, in urban anthropology and mass incarceration, 2012), who is working toward a doctorate in sociology at New York University, intends to answer that question with a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This three-year, $126,000 award is the most prestigious grant for graduate study in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
"Social networks are the resources we use, from the family and friends we rely on for emotional support to the acquaintances we use for getting information about things like jobs and apartments," he says. "I'm interested in how people coming out of prison build their social networks after release."
Riggs, who received a five-year Henry MacCracken Fellowship at NYU, plans to follow a group of people over time, interviewing them periodically to see how their social networks form and change and assessing whether there are differences between those who stay out of prison and those who are return there.
"There also will be an ethnographic component, so I'll be hanging out with people to get to know how they use their network ties in their everyday lives," he says.
He did his undergraduate anthropological work at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where anthropology chair Ric Curtis was his mentor.
"I learned how to do research and had the opportunity to participate in large, nationally funded research projects as an undergraduate," he says. "That was invaluable for getting into a Ph.D. program and getting this NSF grant."
He helped Curtis with research on prostitution in Atlantic City and co-authored final technical reports for projects dealing with violence against undocumented immigrants in Hempstead, Long Island, and methamphetamine markets in New York City.
In independent studies, he learned how to write major grant applications, assisting professors with preparing research proposals to look at medical marijuana markets in Rhode Island and gang structure in several large cities.
In a project funded by the Centers for Disease Control, he worked as part of a team collecting data on identifying behavioral risks for HIV infection. During two cycles of this research, Riggs and team members interviewed and HIV-tested more than 1,000 people. His work in the Anthropology Department led to a publication in an international, peer-reviewed journal, Sexuality Research and Social Policy.
With an undergraduate Vera Institute of Justice Fellowship, he worked at Vera on reform of the harsh Rockefeller drug laws.
He looks forward to a career in academia, but for now, he'll be busy collecting social network data and trying to answer his research questions.
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Aaron Dolor
Using Cell Fats As a Learning Tool
There's a layer of fat that separates the interior of the cell from its environment. Its specialized zwitterionic fats, which have positive and negative electrical charges at different locations, play a critical role in determining whether molecules can get in or out of the cell, but it's not clear precisely what mechanism they use.
Aaron Dolor (Hunter College, B.A. magna cum laude in biochemistry, minor in linguistics, 2012) won a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship by proposing a novel way of exploring how these fats function. Now a doctoral candidate at the University of California-San Francisco, Dolor suggests studying the impact of synthetic zwitterionic fats with an inverse electrical charge.
"The idea is to understand how, if you reverse the charge, it affects lipid biophysics," he says. "That can inform our knowledge of how molecules get into cells, which is potentially important for delivering drugs in diseases like cancer and HIV. Perhaps, if you change the charge, drugs can get through the cell membrane."
That said, Dolor has not yet decided whether to use his $126,000, three-year NSF grant - the most prestigious award for graduate study in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines - for this project. He can transfer it to other research he may choose to undertake.
As a first-year student, he is rotating through different research labs that emphasize translational research (that is, turning findings from basic research into practical applications). This spring, he is working with a group on an artificial kidney. He is focusing on developing a polymer coating that would prevent proteins from adhering to the device after it is implanted into patients.
Born in New York City and raised on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia through age 6, Dolor chose Hunter College because "it's a favorite choice for New Yorkers." He worked for two years as an undergraduate researcher in the laboratory of chemistry professor Charles M. Drain on organic synthesis, photophysical analysis and supramolecular assembly.
With Drain, he studied porphyrins, the iron-containing molecules found in the hemoglobin of red blood cells, the chlorophyll of plant cells and a variety of enzymes; they play an essential role in transporting oxygen, harvesting light and catalyzing oxidation. Porphyrin chemistry has potentially important applications as catalytic agents, sensors for electronic devices, dies for harvesting solar energy, fluorescent tags to track biological activities and photosensitizers for light-based cancer treatment, he explained in his successful application for a 2012 CUNY Jonas E. Salk Scholarship for graduate research.
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Aleksey Ruditskiy
Putting the Sci-Fi in Science
It sounds like science fiction: The U.S. Army charging across the battlefield, wearing body armor that makes it invisible to the enemy. Yet Aleksey Ruditskiy says that might be possible with the right assembly of nanocrystals and the presence of an electrical field.
"We all like science fiction around here," says Ruditskiy (Macaulay Honors College at City College of New York, B.E. in chemical engineering, 2012), who is working toward a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He adds with a laugh, "It's how we get our ideas."
Ruditskiy will pursue his research, which also has what he calls "more mundane applications, like seals for doors on a ship that can compress and decompress by flipping a switch," with a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This three-year, $126,000 award is the most prestigious grant for graduate research in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
"We're trying to develop an environmentally responsive material in a liquid form," he says. "When you apply voltage, the constituent nanoscopic pieces will arrange themselves together in a very ordered way to produce specific effects - to make the material tougher, allow it to stretch or twist or even turn invisible."
He is studying in the laboratory of professor Younan Xia, the Brock Family Chair and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine, who holds joint appointments in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
"Our group is working on developing nanocrystals for medicine, for catalysis, for fuel cells and more," Ruditskiy says.
Born in Minsk, Belarus, he and his family moved to New York City as refugees in 2002, when he was 11.
"My mother and father were both engineers who got degrees in the Soviet Union," he says. "I showed interest in encyclopedias, so they bought them, and I read them. They let me do what I wanted to do."
At City College, he worked with teachers like associate professor Ilona Kretzschmar, who supervised his work on the electromagnetic assembly of Janus particles for nearly four years. (Janus nanoparticles have unique surfaces that allow them to function with two different types of chemistry, such as both attracting and repelling water.)
During two successive summers, Ruditskiy participated in a National Science Foundation-funded Partnerships for Research and Education in Materials program at the University of Chicago, working with the group of associate professor Dmitri Talapin, one of the pioneers in the field of colloidal synthesis of inorganic nanostructures.
(In a colloid, small particles are dispersed within a medium that prevents them from settling rapidly; think of fruit in a bowl of unjelled Jell-O. In this case, the synthesis involved inducing exquisitely small nanoparticles to assemble themselves into a desired composition, size, shape and, in a multicomponent structure, connectivity.) "They got me hooked in the field," he says.
Ruditskiy intends to stay in academia and pursue a professorship. "There are a lot of restrictions in industry; you work on what you're told," he says. "But in academia, you have a lot of freedom to pursue something that pops into your head, and I enjoy that."
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Jan Stepinski
Conducting Air-Tight Research
Suppose you serve a great stew at a dinner party. Will your guests be able to tease out every ingredient that made it so tasty? That's the problem that scientists face in studying the thousands of ingredients in the atmosphere.
In his application for a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Jan Stepinski (Macaulay Honors College at City College, B.E. in environmental engineering, 2013) proposed using the data-crunching, mathematical process of inversion to identify components in the chaotic stream of information detected by atmospheric sensors.
The three-year, $126,000 NSF fellowship is the most prestigious award for graduate study in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
Stepinski, CCNY's 2013 valedictorian, is to start at the Stanford Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering in the fall.
His NSF proposal grew out of his internship at Stanford University in the summer of 2011. He says that Peter Kitanidis, a professor of civil and environmental engineering there, asked him to employ inversion to reveal the properties of aquifers, "which can indicate whether an aquifer has been damaged by fracking or oil drilling and thus requires bioremediation. Inversion also was useful in my research at City College for understanding things like the concentration of pollutants in the atmosphere or chlorophyll in the ocean."
His core undergraduate research was with Alexander Gilerson, an associate professor of electrical engineering, who uses remote sensing to evaluate and predict ocean color.
"In one project, we investigated how the sea floor affects light that propagates through the water to the surface. This is important for understanding how animals camouflage themselves, which has implications for biology and the military."
Despite the premise of the NSF award, Stepinski has shifted the likely focus of his doctoral research, which the NSF fellowship allows.
"When I applied to Stanford and explained my interest in inversion and background in remote sensing, [electrical engineering professor] Howard A. Zebker, who works with radar, responded to me. He offered me a chance to combine my interests. My work will still be related to environmental sciences and involve applied mathematics. But beyond that, I'll have to wait until I get there to find out the details."
Stepinski visited CCNY's remote sensing lab while in high school, but he hastens to say that that did not inspire him to go into remote sensing at the time.
"I was more focused on the humanities and economics as a high school senior and in my freshman year," he says. "But it was in the engineering school that I discovered my love of differential equations. I think mathematics in its purest form is an approximation of the world and is the closest we can get to objectively understanding it. That's why I chose environmental remote sensing."
Although he was born in Brooklyn, he says he "spent most of my youth upstate in the forest. If I am to protect nature, then I have to understand nature through biology and through policy. That is why I studied economics and human needs."
Stepinski accumulated impressive honors at City College, including the Belden Medal for Advanced Calculus, the Post Scholarship from the Society of American Military Engineers and the Peggy Cornell Benline Scholarship from the Municipal Engineers of the City of New York, all awarded in 2012. He also studied at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences and Goethe University in Germany during the summer of 2011 through Macaulay's Opportunities Fund. He graduated with minors in economics and mathematics.
"CCNY helped coalesce my interests in biology, economics and mathematics," he says on the campus website. "By taking different classes in different fields with brilliant professors, it's all come together and put me on a path to a career I will relish."
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Kristina Navrazhina
Doing Battle With Cancer
Volunteering and working with cancer patients has propelled Kristina Navrazhina (Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, 2014) toward pursuing graduate and clinical work in genetics and molecular biology, so she can conduct research and teach at the university level.
"Despite a great deal of research, we don't have a cure for cancer," she says. "I want to be one of the people that finds novel treatments and maybe even a cure, because it's a universal disease. There's a lot of potential in identifying the genes that regulate cancer expression."
Navrazhina has been awarded a federally funded 2013 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. She received one of only 272 scholarships given to college juniors and seniors around the country to encourage research careers in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields; faculty members nominated 1,107 applicants for this highly competitive scholarship.
It covers up to $7,500 a year in undergraduate tuition, fees, books and room and board, with seniors getting one year of support and juniors two years.
Navrazhina was born in Russia and moved to the South Bronx when she was in the fifth grade. "I was the only immigrant in the school, and I couldn't speak a word of English," she says. "I had to work hard on my accent, because I wanted it to be the English that Americans speak." (She succeeded admirably.)
She got an early start in medicine and research when, just out of high school, she landed a rare spot in a summer college-level program at Yale School of Medicine.
"Being the youngest in a group of college students who knew so much more was motivating, and it was really special being around people who also liked science and medicine," she says.
At Hunter, she has explored various areas of biology. She took endocrinology to learn about an intricate body system. In an independent study, she collected data on how health issues affected a Brooklyn neighborhood. Through Macaulay, she took a seminar that took an anthropological approach to looking at how people of different communities intertwine. "You can't just look at biology or chemistry," she says. "Everything is linked together."
She also has had two fully funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates. During one summer, she worked at Mount Sinai Hospital studying neurology diseases. During another summer, she worked at a systems biology laboratory at Rockefeller University. In addition, she is a workshop leader for an organic chemistry class and is an avid dancer.
Navrazhina credits her advisers at Macaulay and in Hunter's Biology Department with encouraging her to apply for the Goldwater and for helping her through the process, such as the proper way to write a personal statement and present her research (hers was looking at breast cancer from a genetic standpoint).
Among those who helped were associate professor Roger Persell; then-dean of arts and sciences Robert Greenberg; Macaulay advisor Adrienne FitzGerald; pre-health director Karen Phillips; and CUNY director of student academic awards and honors James Airozo.
"How many schools do that, private or public?" she asks.
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Christopher Parisano
Digging Into Things
As a child, Christopher Parisano thought of Willets Point, Queens - that warren of rutted streets packed with auto-repair and -salvage shops near where the Mets play ball - as the place where his father and grandfather worked magic on cars, back when cars were the center of a boy's vision of industrial modernity.
However, he says, "when I grew large enough to peer inside a car's engine compartment, my father sharply announced that I would find no future there, as he once did."
And yet, in a roundabout way, he did find his way to the future there. As an undergraduate anthropology major, Parisano (Macaulay Honors College at Queens College, B.A. in political science and anthropology) returned to Willets Point to analyze how the influx of immigrants, the tenacity of the mechanics and the city's desire to redevelop the ostensibly dilapidated area into the "economic engine" of Queens were transforming the borough.
His work won the 2008 Society for Urban, National, and Transnational Anthropology Student Paper Prize, but, more importantly, he says it sharpened his interest in "the production of urban space, property and memory."
And that pointed him toward the proposal that won a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship - a close look at how marginalized city dwellers and the government are squaring off over archeological ruins in Lima, Peru. The three-year, $126,000 grant is the most prestigious award for graduate research in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
A doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center, Parisano is looking at the conflict over a plan to empty out and preserve Lima's pre-Hispanic archeological sites as a tourist-oriented "heritage circuit." These are ruined edifices, many built before they were incorporated into the Inca, and later Spanish empires. Over the past 30 years, people from Peru's highland have migrated to the fringes of the city and constructed shantytowns where many ruins lie.
"The city's newest residents occupy or build upon structures that are thousands of years old," Parisano says. "They come up against a rigid definition of the sanctioned uses of archeological sites that is connected to a rigid definition of the nation-state."
Parisano first went to rural Peru as an undergraduate in 2007, taking an anthropological field-methods course that stressed "participatory action research, a collaborative and pedagogically oriented method of social investigation."
He arrived at another time of friction, when the central government sought to supplant traditional plant-based healers with modern medical and educational institutions.
After graduation, he returned to Lima, teaching English and learning what is now fluent Spanish. Peru's Ministry of Culture then hired him as the first anthropologist in its Office of Civic Participation.
From 2009 to 2011, he spoke to groups about cultural heritage preservation, while designing creative writing workshops that encouraged young adults "to reflect upon their personal histories in relation to official narratives, which were formed around internal armed conflict, reconciliation and shared national heritage."
And, in work that led to his current research, he prepared technical reports on national heritage sites, documenting the activities of groups living amid the ruins.
Parisano is particularly interested in what happens to waste material, for some heritage sites merge with landfills. Since many shantytowns lack sanitary services, contemporary garbage gets mixed with cultural artifacts. The other part of the story is how the bureaucracy deals with the issue.
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Jamar Whaley
Turning Last Place Into First
Jamar Whaley hasn't had it easy. Not when he quit Stuyvesant High School because he was unprepared. Not when he talked his way into a networking job without a GED. Not when he fired himself, rather than laying off a subordinate who needed work more. Not when he clawed his way into Queens College after rescuing a crack-addicted friend. Not when Teach for America sent him to a violent Houston middle school.
And not now, when at age 36 Whaley (Queens College, B.A. magna cum laude in psychology, minor in media studies, 2011) confronted thyroid cancer and seeks admission to a neuroscience doctoral program, where he can use his $126,000 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. It is the most prestigious award for graduate students in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.
But graduate school is at least a year away. First, he is to leave on a 2013 federal Fulbright Fellowship to study at the internationally known Beijing addiction clinic run by Ran Tao, who is noted for his work on Internet addiction disorder.
Whaley developed his NSF and Fulbright applications in tandem. The United States is said to rank second behind China in the number of Internet addicts, who "neglect academic work and domestic responsibilities and suffer financial problems and social isolation similar to substance abusers," Whaley writes in his NSF proposal. His prospective doctoral work would involve functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare how Internet addicts' brains function normally and when encountering addictive triggers.
Whaley's great-grandmother, Elizabeth, now 91, raised him from infancy in Flushing. "I want to do for the world what my great-grandmother has done for me," he said in 2009. "I want to make sure others can have a life and excel after they have underachieved."
Recognizing his talent, middle-school teacher Jami Rosen pushed him to take the test that got him into Stuyvesant, one of the city's best. "I did well in standardized testing, but I didn't have the tools to survive," he says. Asthma had frequently kept him out of class. He flunked out.
In 1997, without a diploma or GED, he talked his way into a technical job with Exodus Communications in Jersey City. By 2000, he was a middle manager, supervising 10 consultants who handled computers and networking for companies that included Viacom and The New York Times.
On 9/11, "we had friends in the towers," including support staff, he says. Exodus was forced into layoffs. "It came down to me and one of the people I was managing. I took the package and asked them to let my employee take my position. He had greater needs. I'd grown up poor and had saved the money I made," he says.
He spent time in Oklahoma with friends and passed several computer- and network-related certification tests. "This made me think I could study and do well." But as he was preparing to return to New York, he took time to help a friend through drug rehabilitation. To better understand her experience, he volunteered at a drug-abuse clinic.
His middle-school mentor had gone to Queens College, so he applied there but had to argue for a chance to take the CUNY admission test. "When I found I was accepted, it was one of the happiest days of my life," he says.
Whaley originally planned on clinical psychology, but an experimental methods class led him into research in associate professor Robert Ranaldi's learning, motivation and drug addiction laboratory. After attending a national conference as a Minority Access to Research Careers fellow, he noted the scarcity of minority primary investigators and graduate students in his psychology and neuroscience programs. He decided to become a role model, including by joining a peer-mentoring program.
In 2009 - the year he also won a federal Goldwater Scholarship - he participated in the Yale Biomedical Science Training and Enrichment Program, a 10-week summer research program, particularly for under-represented minorities, that is funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
After graduation, he went to Houston to teach science to impoverished minority students. He found it a miserable experience, although he speaks with pride about helping a failing youngster named Melchi pass into eighth grade. "He called me on his 15th birthday and told me that he had a 90 average in science and that my belief in him made him realize that he wasn't stupid and could do better."
It wasn't until Whaley got back to New York that he discovered the thyroid cancer; his prognosis looks good after surgery. "After a long, rough road, this has been the toughest," he says. "Getting the NSF reaffirmed my being where I need to be. I knew I would fight cancer as hard as I could because there is so much I want to do. My time for giving to others isn't over yet."
But at the moment, Whaley needs help. His fight against cancer has left him and his great-grandmother destitute, and he's scrambling to raise funds to finance his study in China and her upkeep. Donations may be made at http://www.gofundme.com/cancertofulbright.
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Ru Chen
Looking for a Cancer Cure
Long before Ru Chen was born in a rural Fujian province in China, her grandfather was the area's only physician, although ignorance and tradition often led his patients to distrust his medical advice.
Every night before bed, "grandfather would always light a candle, put on his glasses and read me one page of his herbal handbook" with its beautiful illustrations of plants, Chen wrote in her application for a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Scholarship.
At age 4, Chen learned the word for cancer when she saw a crying woman holding her son in her grandfather's clinic. Ultimately, cancer claimed her grandfather, as well.
"It was heartbreaking watching my greatest mentor pass away," she recalls. "Inspired by grandfather's passion in cancer research and his dedication to medical service, I am driven to pursue my graduate school studies in cancer drug development."
This fall Chen (City College, B.E. in chemical engineering, 2013) heads for the University of Delaware to pursue a doctorate with the help of a 2013 NSF grant, the most prestigious award for graduate students in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. It provides $126,000 over three years to support graduate-level research.
This is a remarkable achievement for someone who had spent a year in a Chinese law school and barely spoke English when she immigrated four years ago.
"I'd read the newspaper every day for two or three years, morning and night to improve my oral English" Chen says. "The one thing I feel lucky for is that math is universal. But for other classes, vocabulary was very difficult for me. I'd spend five or six hours to preview and review course materials before every class. I feel lucky to be at CCNY, because all the professors and students are all very friendly and helpful."
She praises the professors who have encouraged her to become a researcher. With Raymond Tu, she investigated how temperature at the air-water interface affects kinetic differences in the self-assembly of the Beta 9H peptide; self-assembly holds promise for future biomaterials.
With Teresa Bandosz, she explored the synthesis of copper-based metallic organic framework composites, which could improve environmental sustainability.
During a summer internship at Merck & Co., she designed and conducted distillation experiments that were related to vaccine research. And, she says, just about every professor and advisor helped along her NSF application.
On campus, Chen was workshop and tutoring coordinator for the Chemistry Department's Peer-Led Team Learning Workshop. As president of The City College chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, she helped introduce minority middle-school students to the potential opportunities in science and engineering.
Chen's NSF proposal for doctoral research is to explore the possibility of detecting cancer by looking for abnormal variations of glycoproteins, which are proteins attached by carbohydrates through a process called glycosylation. Many mammalian diseases involve glycosylation, but its role is not clear.
"There are a lot of changelings in this field waited to be explored," she says.
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Dane Christie
Looking at the Light
There's a long way between a pitcher's mound in the Dominican Republic and a research lab at Princeton University, but Dane Christie is traveling it as smoothly as the balls he once hurled for a Toronto Bluejays minor league team.
And, thanks to a $126,000 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship awarded in 2013, Christie is ahead in the count toward a doctorate in chemical engineering. The scholarship is the most prestigious award for graduate students in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines.
Growing up on the island of Jamaica, Christie (Hostos Community College, A.S. in chemical engineering, 2011; City College 2013, B.E. in chemical engineering) played cricket. He didn't know about baseball until a Dominican neighbor filled him in, and then he decided to give it a try.
After the Bluejays signed him, "my mom told me I needed to think about college, but that was the farthest thing from my mind. I was a 6-foot, 7-inch left hander."
He played for the Bluejays' Dominican Republic farm team for two years, until it released him.
He came to New York, where his mother was living, worked in construction for four years and found his way to the Hostos-City College dual-degree engineering program.
Hostos assistant professor Yoel Rodriguez, who teaches chemistry and physics, "told me I had an aptitude for science and should be looking to go to grad school. He gave me the push and the belief in myself I was lacking at the time."
At City, he found new mentors in professor John Lombardi and associate professor Ilona Kretzschmar. Kretzschmar, with whom Christie researched colloidal assembly, says Christie devised his NSF proposal "after careful study of the Princeton website and the research of the professors he found there. I just offered guidance in figuring out how to ask an interesting scientific question."
His NSF proposal evolved from his current research into improving the efficiency of organic solar (photovoltaic) cells, which generate electricity from sunlight. His current focus is on dye-sensitized solar cells, which marry a layer of an organic dye to a layer of an inorganic semiconductor. These cells are expensive, their production involves toxic solvents and, partly due to a poorly ordered organic layer, their maximum efficiency is about 12 percent.
In his NSF proposal, Christie suggests researching the purely organic bulk-heterojunction solar cell.
"I proposed an experimental protocol allowing you to fabricate a well ordered active layer, which would boost efficiency," Christie says.
That could lead to better, cheaper and more environmentally friendly solar panels. This approach could be applied to other technologies, including LED lights and batteries.
Christie married Ashley Christie, whom he met when she was a student at Baruch. She transferred to City College when he did and this year earns her bachelor's degree in psychology. She is heading into New York University's master's in social work program.
"I accomplished everything I wanted to accomplish as an undergrad," he says. "I came with the intention of doing well enough to have options for grad school. Based on work inside the classroom and in research labs, that all put me in a position where I had a competitive graduate application package, and I'm really happy about that."
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Nikoleta Despodova
Putting Rape Cases on Trial
Nearly 25 percent of women and 7.6 percent of men are raped and/or physically assaulted by an intimate partner or acquaintance, according to an often-cited national study in 2000. Women account for 85 percent of the victims of intimate-partner violence, men only 15 percent. Among same-sex couples, 11 percent of lesbians and 15 percent of gay men reported violence by a partner, a 2003 study found, but other researchers contend that the rate is far higher.
So what happens when these cases arrive in criminal court? Do jurors give the same weight to testimony in same-sex cases as in heterosexual cases, or, as a 2009 study indicates, do they discount the likelihood or seriousness of violence in same-sex households?
Nikoleta Despodova (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, B.A. in forensic psychology, 2013) proposed exploring such questions with a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The $126,000, three-year award is the most prestigious one for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. She will conduct her research at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she will seek a Ph.D. in psychology and law.
She began to question how people evaluate evidence when she was 16, during the trial of the motorcyclist who fatally injured her grandfather. Although she completed four years of baccalaureate studies in English and literature in her native Bulgaria, "in order to find answers to my questions, I made one of the biggest decisions of my life and moved ... to the United States to pursue a degree in forensic psychology" in 2008, she writes in her NSF application.
She decided to enroll in John Jay after attending an open house and hearing a presentation by a psychology professor.
There, she conducted independent research with professor Mark Fondacaro into whether a defendant's or victim's sexual orientation affects jurors' perceptions of the mental state of heterosexual male and gay men defendants at the time of the crime. She worked in professor Margaret Bull Kovera's research lab on federally funded studies examining the effectiveness of different methods of expert testimony and whether the people who administer photo-array lineups affect eyewitness identifications.
And, in research that laid the groundwork for her doctoral interests, she worked with professor Elizabeth Jeglic to examine the attitudes of student jurors. That research was supported by the U.S. Department of Education's Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program, which prepares underrepresented students for doctoral work.
"The stereotypical image of rape and intimate-partner violence is of a man being stronger and assaulting a woman, but when faced with two male or two female partners, jurors have doubts about who they're supposed to believe," she says. "About 70 percent of [student] participants in the previous study [with Jeglic] found the heterosexual male guilty, but only 50 percent found a lesbian or gay man guilty. That's a significant difference."
"People didn't expect such findings," Despodova says. She hypothesizes that intimate-partner violence among same-sex couples may be seen as less serious, less likely to reoccur and less likely to lead to physical injuries.
In her NSF research proposal, she suggests giving questionnaires to 240 jury-eligible community members, followed by a mock trial. Besides looking at whether there is a tendency to judge gay men and lesbian defendants less harshly than heterosexual males, she proposed investigating the extent to which rape myths, homophobia and stereotypes about gay men and lesbians affect such judgments.
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Julius Edson
Fighting Deadly Bacteria
The news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March 2013 was chilling: Deadly infections by bacteria that are immune to even the strongest antibiotics are rising, and there is only a "limited window of opportunity" to stop them.
CDC director Thomas R. Frieden called these "nightmare bacteria" that might transfer their drug resistance to other bacteria.
The case in point was carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, benign in the human gut, but potentially deadly if it enters the bloodstream, lungs or urinary tract. That is far from the only threat. Largely due to decades of overuse of antibiotics in humans and commercially raised animals, drug-resistant bacteria are becoming disturbingly common.
Julius Edson (City College, B.E. in chemical engineering, 2012), now a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine, won a $126,000, three-year National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2013 by suggesting a new way of attacking these lethal bacteria - with a substance found in the shells of shrimp. The NSF fellowship is the most prestigious award for graduate study in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.
Most antibiotics are designed to disrupt the enzymatic processes that bacteria need to grow, but bacteria have evolved to resist them. Edson suggests using chitosan, a substance found in the shells of crabs, shrimp and other marine animals.
On the nanoscale, chitosan can damage the bacterial cell membrane through an electrostatic interaction. Most cell membranes carry a negative charge, while chitosan has a positive charge; in an electrostatic interaction, negative attracts positive, as in a magnet.
"The chitosan sticks to and ruptures the cell membrane of microbes then serves as an antenna to direct the body's own immune system to attack," he says.
There is one big problem, however, which Edson hopes his research will overcome: Chitosan dissolves only in an acid environment of pH 5.0 or lower, which is more acidic than the human body (at pH 6 to 8) can tolerate. So Edson intends to chemically modify chitosan so it can readily function in the body without losing its innate properties.
Edson became interested in this field while studying colloidal systems with City College associate professor Ilona Kretzschmar.
"I went to City College as premed, but the more I worked on nanotechnology with Doctor Kretzschmar and the more I thought of my own projects, the more I realized that a degree in chemical engineering was a perfect fit for me, and I'll still be able to help in the medical field."
Born in Nigeria, he says that as a youngster he contracted "various illnesses. They didn't think I'd survive through adolescence, but I am here and healthy."
With survival came a sense of responsibility to help others.
He immigrated to the United States at 7, went to school in Maryland and moved to New York to enter City College at 18. As an undergraduate, he secured a scholarship from the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation, an NSF-funded program to encourage underrepresented minority students to pursue a baccalaureate degree in the STEM fields.
Thanks to the Stokes program, he conducted water-treatment studies in small communities in Cartagena, Colombia. Additionally, with help from Kretzschmar, he traveled to Stockholm to conduct research on biomaterials for medical applications, as well as to Graz, Austria, to work with lead-free piezoelectric materials. NSF funded these projects.
After he earns his doctorate, perhaps in 2017, Edson intends to continue his research into fighting drug-resistant microbes, either by going the entrepreneurial route in a start-up company or by teaching.
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Vadricka Etienne
A New Take on Immigration
America, it is famously said, is a land of immigrants. The Pew Hispanic Center reported recently that the nation's immigrant population reached a record 40.4 million in 2011, legal and illegal. Their share of the population is less than the peak of just under 15 percent during the flood of immigration between 1890 and 1920.
Vadricka Etienne, a second-year doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center, intends to explore whether a small slice of these immigrants - the approximately 776,000 U.S. residents of Haitian ancestry - will cling to their roots into the third generation or, like so many other groups, will dissolve into the great American melting pot. To conduct her research, she has the support of a $126,000, three-year National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the premier grant in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
A second-generation Haitian-American who grew up in Orlando, Fla., Etienne (University of South Florida, B.A. in communication, minors in sociology and anthropology, 2011) says that previous research on the assimilation of children of immigrants has focused on their ethnic identity choices but not on how members of the second generation try to convey their culture to their children.
"While it was less complicated for the first generation to pass on their cultural heritage because they often raise their children in ways similar to their own upbringing, the second generation has refashioned the cultural heritage of their parents as they participate in the American culture, which begs the questions of not only what is the second generation passing on but how?" she writes in her NSF proposal.
Her hypothesis is that most likely the third generation will not maintain its Haitian identity, particularly in cities without strong cultural support. (The 2010 census tallied about 268,000 New Yorkers who were born in Haiti or were of Haitian descent.)
Immigrant Haitians tend to stay connected with their cultural practices through community networks built by earlier Haitians and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, Etienne says. But members of the second generation may move elsewhere, lessening their sense of connection, and when that happens, their sense of being Haitian may dissipate "because they lack certain cues that identify them as different from African-Americans. By the time they have children, the constant need to prove their cultural heritage might be deemed unnecessary," she writes.
She envisions taking an ethnographic approach involving interviews with families. "I'd like to see how they identify and how they talk to their kids about their background to assure that their kids have a positive feeling," she says. "Do children in the third generation spend time with their grandparents, speaking Creole? If they don't speak Creole, they can't participate in the culture, they can't listen to the music. If they don't have the language, what do they maintain?"
Etienne says she applied to CUNY because of three professors "who I kept coming across as I did research on assimilation and black identities" -- Philip Kasinitz, Nancy Foner and Richard Alba, who have written about immigration by various groups, assimilation and ethnic politics. "When I found out they were at the Graduate Center, I had to apply."
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Jasmine Hatcher
The Elements of Research
The radioactive element technetium-99 is, proverbially, a blessing and a curse. It exists in two forms. One, 99mTc , is the radionuclide most commonly used to image the body in nuclear medicine scans.
The other, 99Tc, sits in old waste tanks as a byproduct of uranium and plutonium fission from nuclear weapons manufacturing in the 1940s and1950s. Those potentially leaky storage tanks threaten to contaminate water and the food chain. With a radioactive half-life of 212,000 years, 99Tc poses a problem that won't go away any time soon.
"I want to see whether we can reduce technetium to a pure metal form to store it more safely," says Jasmine Hatcher (Queens College, B. A. in chemistry, 2009), who in 2013 won a $126,000, three-year National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The NSF grant is the most prestigious award for graduate study in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. She is conducting her research at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Hatcher is uniquely positioned to take a fresh approach to solving this problem. She became interested in chemical research while studying at Queensborough Community College, where she earned an associate degree in 2006.
Associate professor Sharon Lall-Ramnarine became her mentor and arranged for her to work as her summer research assistant at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 2005 to 2007. Later, "she convinced me to go to grad school," Hatcher says. "Any excuse or doubts, she shot down."
She moved on to Queens College, where she studied with professor of chemistry and biochemistry Robert Engel. His laboratory has synthesized organic salts and, more recently, converted them into ionic liquids (salts that are liquid, rather than crystalline, at room temperature) and attached them to antimicrobial surfaces.
Even before she graduated, Brookhaven National Laboratory scientist James Wishart, who collaborates with Lall-Ramnarine, brought her in to work as a lab tech.
"He hired me with the intention of sending me off to grad school, but I didn't know that," Hatcher says. "He knew I was going to be a scientist. It was working with him that I found what I wanted to do."
Lall-Ramnarine's and Wishart's research involves designing and characterizing new types of ionic liquids, which hold potential for use in fuel cells, as lubricants and as media for radioactive waste.
During three years at Brookhaven after earning her bachelor's degree, Hatcher became proficient in purifying ionic liquids. She worked mostly with physical and organic chemists but did a side project with a nuclear engineer and says she "saw the need for chemists who are really knowledgeable about nuclear energy and how things work."
As a result, Wishart recommended that she pursue a doctorate under Hunter professor Lynn Francesconi, whose research focuses on technetium.
"She has an interest in ionic liquids, which I'm proficient at making, and it was all downhill from there," Hatcher jokes.
As a first-year student, Hatcher is rotating through laboratories to get a broader frame of reference for her doctoral research. In the spring, for example, she again worked with Engel, this time on electrochemistry of ruthenium and platinum compounds.
But this summer, she gets to start work on her own project. "I can't wait," she says.
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Ben Hixon
Just the Facts, Ma'am
Suppose you're walking down the street, experience a pang of hunger and decide that only vegetarian sushi will satisfy you. Your smartphone pulls up 1,000 reviews. How can you find the nearest one with good service, affordable prices and, above all, great vegetarian sushi?
"Open IE, or open information extraction," says Ben Hixon (Hunter College, B.A. in computer science, 2012). Now in a University of Washington doctoral program, Hixon won a $126,000 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the premier graduate research award in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields in 2013.
"In a normal search, you're looking for key words, but in Open IE, you're using facts," he explains. Open IE automatically pulls facts from news stories, blogs and other text on the Internet and catalogs them in a database. Hixon is figuring out how to search the database.
For example, "if you have the sentence, 'President Obama is in the White House,'" he says, "you can extract that Obama is the current president."
Hixon's interest dates to an undergraduate database class with Hunter professor Susan Epstein, whose interests range from machine learning to human-machine dialogue. "She passed around a sign-up sheet for people interested in research," he says. She was building a dialogue system for blind people to query the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library" in Manhattan in collaboration with Rebecca Passonneau, director of Columbia University's Center for Computational Learning Systems.
Over several semesters, Hixon attacked aspects of the library project. To help the library's voice recognition system better understand authors' names and book titles, he used machine learning to quantify similarities between phonemes, the smallest semantically significant units in spoken language, to better associate spoken with written words.
"We could say, 'Lunch sounds closer to launch that it does to bunch,'" he says. "The phonemes corresponding to the 'uh' and 'aw' sounds are more similar than the phonemes corresponding to the 'l' and 'b' sounds. If the computer thinks I said 'naked launch' but it knows that 'launch' and 'lunch' are very similar, then it's more likely to make the appropriate correction and give me the book 'Naked Lunch.'"
He made these findings publicly available after delivering a paper, co-authored with another student, in Italy.
In a follow-up project, he used phoneme similarities in a novel algorithm for voice search, which matches a spoken query to an item in a large database, and evaluated the algorithm on a set of gender-balanced, spoken book titles.
Working with Passonneau during a 2011 Research Experience for Undergraduates program, Hixon devised a way to measure the semantic specificity of a request made in a human-machine dialogue. And Hixon worked with graduate student Eric Osisek on a dialogue-based system that can recommend books to Heiskell Library users. Essentially, it treats books as nodes on a graph and finds clusters of books similar to those that the patron has previously requested.
In the summer after graduation, he returned to Passonneau's lab. He developed an open dialogue manager that automatically combs a database looking for terms that would be most useful in managing dialogue about that database. He was to present their paper on this research at the June 2013 conference of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics.
Meanwhile, his research with University of Washington professor Oren Etzioni, who pioneered open information extraction, has shifted from voice recognition to "conversational search."
"The structured knowledge obtained via Open IE is conducive to conversational interaction, while unstructured keywords don't lend themselves to conversation," Hixon says. "How would it feel to have a conversation with another person using only keywords? Not too pleasant.
"The idea is you could go to Google or Bing and enter a long question. If Google doesn't understand what you want, a chat box will pop up asking you questions. Since we are not there in terms of voice recognition, I'm focusing on text-based search in a Web browser, but eventually we would like to move to voice, because when you're walking around and looking for that sushi restaurant, you don't want to type or stare at your screen."
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Meryl Horn
Putting Things in Context
Context alone can bring back memories. Walking through a sunny park might make you think of a joyous summertime picnic. On the other hand, a movie with a happy scene of companionable drinking in a bar might trigger a recovering alcoholic to crave a drink.
"One of the last frontiers in all of biology is uncovering which neural components make up a memory," says Meryl Horn (Hunter College, B.A. in biology, 2012). Now in a doctoral program at the University of California-San Francisco, she intends to use her 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to get a better understanding of how memory works. The $126,000 grant is the most prestigious award for graduate study in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
She decided to pursue her interest in science when she was a receptionist across the street from Hunter College - after she had earned a baccalaureate degree from Clark University in international development and social change.
In her first year, when she was working full time, she encountered associate professor Roger Persell, who was teaching an honors introduction to biology class.
"I read papers on learning and memory, saw how researchers measure memory using behavioral tasks in rodents and realized that I could study this a long time," she recalls. "In neurobiology, I found the perfect combination of hard scientific rigor that was missing in international development, as well as the opportunity to ask questions about the mind and how the brain can encode and retrieve memories. That's when I realized I wanted to do a Ph.D."
She got into research in the laboratory of assistant professor Carmen V. Melendez-Vasquez, who studies the formation of the myelin sheath that surrounds nerve fibers. Horn spent three years in her laboratory, during which she co-authored a paper investigating the molecular mechanisms behind the formation of myelin in the peripheral nervous system, which is outside of the brain and spinal cord.
At UC-San Francisco, Horn switched her field of research to learning and memory. Now studying with neurology professor Patricia Janak, who holds an endowed chair in addiction research, she intends to use her NSF grant to look at how the brain's circuitry that controls contextual memory can be altered in drug-addicted animals.
For example, a rat that is addicted to cocaine might be trained to push a lever in a box to get a dose. If it is later put back in the box, even after it has been weaned from the drug, it is likely to press that lever again and again.
"The hippocampus is important for forming contextual memories, but it's not clear how it later retrieves them," Horn says. She intends to use optogenetics - a technique that uses light to control the activity of a specific population of neurons in living tissue - to stimulate neurons in regions targeted by the hippocampus to figure out which target region is responsible for making the rat push the lever when placed back in the box.
"The fact that a context brings back memories is very relevant to human behavior," she says. "For addicts, contextual cues can trigger processes that lead to relapse, and can thus be detrimental to their recovery."
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Ekaterina Larina
Going Sea Deep
Back in the Maastrichtian Age - before Earth's last mass extinction some 65.5 million years ago - ammonites were as dominant in the sea as dinosaurs were on land. These long-extinct creatures (think of an octopus with a shell) still hold secrets, and Ekaterina Larina intends to reveal them.
Larina (Brooklyn College, B.S. in geology, 2012), now in the geology master's program at Brooklyn College, won a 2013 three-year National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to seek proof about what caused that mass extinction. The $126,000 NSF grant is the most prestigious award for graduate research in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
The extinction most likely happened because of a sustained global winter. As to what caused that climate change, the most popular theory is that a massive asteroid smashed into Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, spewing debris into the atmosphere and darkening the sky. However, some scientists point to climate-changing gasses from the prolonged volcanic event that created India's Deccan Plateau, an area of basalt more than a mile thick and substantially larger than California that was deposited over hundreds of thousands of years.
Although the end result would have been the same, the asteroid strike would have brought a rapid chill, while the Deccan eruptions would have cooled the world gradually.
So what can ammonites contribute? Larina says their well-preserved shells in the Owl Creek Formation, a section of ancient ocean floor that she studies in Mississippi, can reveal a record of the ancient climate. In addition, comparative analysis of isotopes of oxygen and carbon in the fossils could clarify the depths at which the three species of ammonites lived, providing a richer understanding of prehistoric marine life.
As an undergraduate, Larina visited Mississippi through an NSF-sponsored Research Experiences for Undergraduates. "The focus was to study ammonite distribution in space and time," she says. "Different species were dominant as you moved through the 500,000 years right before their extinction, first the Baculites and Discoscaphites then the Eubaculites. Why did this change happen? Was it due to gradual environmental change? Competitive replacement? I'm trying to reconstruct the temperatures and to study how changes in ammonite distribution could be related to environmental perturbations, such as climate or global sea-level change."
Larina's fascination with ancient mysteries began in her native Kazakhstan, an area rich in far-older ammonites, from 200 million years ago. "The first time I held a fossil in my hands was when I was seven years old ... a trilobite brought to me by my grandfather, who was a geologist," she writes in her NSF application.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, her parents insisted that she pursue a practical career in management and economics rather than paleontology. She had all but finished a master's degree in Russia when she leapt at the opportunity to study in the United States.
At Brooklyn College, she started from the beginning - including intensive English as a second language - as she worked toward a B.S. in geology.
"There are amazing professors, and everybody is working on different types of research," she says.
For example, lecturer Matthew Garb, who works on the last mass extinction and ammonites, took his stratigraphy class (which studies rock layers) to New Jersey's Atlantic coast to collect data and write reports.
"I was able to reconstruct what was happening 75 million years ago, how deep was the ocean, where was the beach and what creatures lived here."
Garb became her mentor, and they conduct research together.
After earning her master's in 2014, Larina intends to pursue a doctorate with her NSF fellowship. Her goal is to combine research with teaching at a university. Meanwhile, she is teaching a stratigraphy and an introductory geology course to Brooklyn College undergraduates.
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Sarah Levitan
Making Autism Compute
With an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million Americans having an autism spectrum disorder and the prevalence of autism believed to have risen to 1 in 88 births, there needs to be a reliable method of diagnosis so that young children can get the early intervention that will help them to live full lives.
Sarah Ita Levitan (Brooklyn College, B.S. in computer science, 2013) hopes to develop an objective, computer-based system that would analyze children's speech, looking for patterns that would identify those with autism spectrum disorders.
Her idea helped her win a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This three-year, $126,000 grant is the most prestigious award for graduate study in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, and it will support her research in Columbia University's computer science doctoral program.
"As of now, there isn't a simple diagnostic test for autism," Levitan says. "It is done by a set of subjective assessments to evaluate if children have behavioral disorders. There have been a lot of studies in psychology on different speech patterns. They have looked at things like echolalia, where children repeat things back to you, or turn-taking in conversation. Whereas most people try not to cut each other off, some individuals with autism spectrum disorders seem to have trouble communicating and turn-taking; they tend to be a lot slower in responding or cut people off."
Her interest in autism spectrum disorders dates to high school and college, where she volunteered and then worked for the Hebrew Academy for Special Children in Brooklyn. "While working with these children, I observed first-hand how early detection could make a world of a difference," says Levitan.
At Brooklyn College, she worked on a computational biology research project with Dina Sokol, an associate professor of computer and information science. "She studies tandem repeats in DNA, which are used to diagnose diseases and in human identity testing. She developed an algorithm to find the repeats, but there are so many, it's hard to know what to do with them. I've been working with her on clustering the data into groups of similar repeats," Levitan says.
She credits Sokol with being "an incredible mentor. She introduced me to research as an undergraduate, encouraged me to apply for an undergraduate research grant, and she is the faculty advisor for the Women in Computer Science Club."
At Sokol's suggestion, Levitan applied for a Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates award from the Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research. That led to spending the summer after her junior year conducting research in the laboratory of Julia Hirschberg, director of Columbia's Spoken Language Processing Group.
She studied entrainment, the common phenomenon of people unconsciously sounding like one another during a conversation, through a computer analysis of supreme court discussions. "In conversation, people tend to adapt similar speech patterns, such as adopting a higher pitch or speaking louder. There's a lot of fascinating psychology involved as well as computer science," she says.
The experience encouraged Levitan to start a chapter of the women's computing organization, the Association for Computing Machinery-Women, on campus. "As an undergraduate, I've seen a major gender imbalance in computer science. I'd like to encourage more women to consider majoring in computer science and provide a forum for networking and support. For many women, computer science isn't on their radar when they consider what fields to go into. That is unfortunate because there are so many interesting and exciting research areas where a degree in computer science can take you."
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Arash Nowbahar
Going With the Flow
Arash Ramin Nowbahar studies gunk, specifically the gunk that forms in ocean drilling rigs when seawater meets oil.
"It clogs the machinery and makes it harder to push out the oil," he says. "It's soap scum, which forms naturally when you pump in seawater. The water has ions that interact with the fatty acids in oil, which are like detergents. The same thing happens in your sink, when you have hard water and soap."
These surface-active agents (surfactants), he says, "are found everywhere - the oil on our face or in our eyelids when we blink."
Nowbahar (City College, B.E. in chemical engineering, 2012), now at the University of California-Santa Barbara, won a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to study these and other aspects of microfluidics and interfacial rheology, which he defines as "the study of flow, or why does ketchup flow differently from water?"
The $126,000 three-year grant is the most prestigious award for graduate study in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Dow Chemical Co. funds his research project.
Born and raised in Queens, he became interested in surfactants as an undergraduate at City College's Grove School of Engineering, from which he graduated with a 4.0 GPA. Thanks to its honors program, he attended tuition-free.
At City, he studied with chemistry assistant professor Raymond Tu. "He was more interested in how surfactants came together to form crystals. They self-assemble, so their structures are really interesting," Nowbahar says. "People want to know how we can build a self-assembled electronic device, without our having to tell the components where to go. We had a plan for letting interesting structures grow and then coat them with gold or another substance for use in electronics."
Nowbahar secured two NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates that involved complex computations. One was at the University of Chicago, where he modeled vibrations in Antarctic ice shelves. "Something in global warming is changing the natural cycle and causing them to collapse," he says.
The other was at KTH Royal institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where he studied the flow of small dust particles in channels. This has applications in filters and engines alike. "Even in cloud formations, tiny droplets in air are moving around," he says. "How do they come together?"
At UC-Santa Barbara, where he studies with associate professor Todd Squires, he hopes to continue learning about surfactants. He would like to use microfluidic devices to enable new capabilities in studying how surfactants like soap behave on an interface, such as where water and air meet.
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Lukman Solola
Elementary Exploration
Dysprosium, europium, neodymium, terbium, yttrium: The names of these rare-earth elements may not be familiar, but they are in critically short supply when they are needed to produce cellphones, electronic equipment and clean energy products like wind turbines, electric vehicles, photovoltaic thin-film solar cells and fluorescent lights.
Despite the term "rare earths," these and a dozen similar metallic elements actually are not rare. Some are as common as copper. But typically they are dispersed in other ores, rather than being concentrated, as gold is in nuggets or veins. Ninety-five percent of the world's production is in China, although many countries mine them, including the United States.
Lukman Solola (Brooklyn College, B.S. in chemistry, 2012), now in a chemistry doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania, is looking for ways to chemically separate the lanthanide group of these elements from the ores that contain them.
He now has the support of a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This three-year, $126,000 grant is the most prestigious award for graduate study in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
"The United States has lanthanide ores, but separation is tricky," he says. "The way they are separated now is by crushing the rocks, roasting them, putting them in a slurry and repeatedly passing them through chemicals to selectively separate the elements you're looking for. Those chemicals are not environmentally friendly, so it is difficult to exploit the resources we have here, because we have a vibrant environmentally friendly policy."
China, however, has built a near monopoly by paying far less attention to the environmental damage that the byproducts of rare-earth extraction can leave behind.
Solola hopes for a safer and more elegant solution utilizing ligands, which are ions or functional groups of molecules that bind to metal atoms.
"We can select for the ligands we want by changing their oxidation state. When they are oxidized, they will have slightly different chemical behaviors compared to other elements close to them, so it will be easier to separate them to get them out of the slurry," he says.
He hastens to add that in his laboratory he does not deal with rocks, just reagents and compounds in this search for basic science. His mentor is Eric J. Schelter, an assistant professor of inorganic and materials chemistry.
Solola was born in Nigeria and moved to Brooklyn about six years ago, after finishing high school. He gravitated to Brooklyn College. "It wasn't too big, it wasn't too small, and the academics were top notch," he says.
As an undergraduate, most of his research was in biochemistry. One project, which ran for two years, involved using chrome azurol S (CAS) assay to measure iron uptake by Mycobacteria smegmatis, a fast-growing bacterium that does not cause illness and is commonly used for laboratory research.
In the summer of 2011, he interned at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, looking at the role of the NHE6 and NHE9 sodium-hydrogen exchangers in membrane-protein trafficking.
And in the summer of 2010, he worked on breast cancer vaccines at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. There, he investigated whether triggering an immune response to the polio vaccine, which most people received as children, could fight breast cancer; to do this, he delivered non-infective portions of polio virus genes into cancer cells via weakened Listeria bacteria.
It was a high school chemistry teacher who motivated Solola to pursue chemistry. Now, he volunteers at a Philadelphia high school, helping to teach 11th- and 12th-grade chemistry.
"We collaborate and develop suitable labs and sometimes bring kids here to Penn, so they can see what it feels like to be in a university lab," he says. "They come mostly from underprivileged in underrepresented groups. We are trying to get them much more interested in science. It would be great to inspire some of my students to go into science, but, ultimately, I aspire to make them see the world from a different perspective.
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Maria Strangas
Lizard Lessons
When she graduated from East Lansing High School, Maria Louisa Strangas gave this as her senior quote, drawn from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip: "If your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life."
Eight years later, as a CUNY Graduate Center doctoral student, she is heading into the Brazilian forests to study how temperature patterns have affected the evolution of some rare lizards.
Armed with a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Strangas (University of Rochester, B.S. in ecology and evolutionary biology, 2010) intends to look for Gymnophthalmid lizards found only on certain mountains. Her three-year, $126,000 grant is the most prestigious award for graduate research in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
"I'm interested in thermophysiology, which is how temperature affects physiology and what temperatures allow lizards to perform optimally," she says. "One thing I'd like to do is look at patterns to try to identify regions of the forest that might harbor the species most vulnerable to future climate change."
Her work grows out of her curiosity about the process of diversification in the Atlantic forest of Brazil, which has received far less attention than the country's Amazon forest.
"The genetic structure and physiological traits of lizard populations can reflect past climate events," she says. "My NSF proposal involved looking at three pairs of sister species; one of each pair lives in wet, humid forest, while its closest relative lives in dry, rocky areas. Looking at behavioral, physiological and genomic differences between the species can show how past climate change and glacial cycles have influenced their evolution."
As an undergraduate, she worked on research projects documenting the composition of forests near Rochester, studying meadow pollinator communities and surveying woodland amphibians. She also worked with loggerhead sea turtles through ARCHELON, the Sea Turtle Conservation Society of Greece.
After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 2010, she went to work as a technician in the laboratory of City College assistant professor Ana Carnaval. Carnaval studies spatial patterns of biodiversity and their underlying evolutionary and ecological processes, with the aim of improving biodiversity prediction and conservation in tropical regions. Strangas' research diverges from the main thrust of the laboratory by looking at physiological changes.
"I was very interested in the questions her lab was asking," Strangas says. "I've been interested in ecology and evolution for a long time and studied them in college. Working in her lab was fascinating while I decided whether to go on for a doctorate."
During those years, she also taught fifth- and sixth-graders science at an afterschool program in Queens. Carnaval continues to be involved as her Ph.D. mentor.
At the moment, Strangas is extracting DNA and building phylogenetic trees that reflect relationships among the various lizards she hopes to encounter. She also is comparing the distribution of her target species to maps of climate stability.
The Carnaval lab "is building models to predict areas of the forest that have been incredibly stable over time," she says. "Those niche areas appear to have the highest species diversity and the most genetic diversity within the species."
Strangas adds that she chose to study lizards because they are extremely vulnerable to climate change and don't move far during their lifetimes. By sampling particular populations, she will get information not only on their evolutionary histories but also about the climatic histories of their locations.
And, yes, her research is all but certain to involve getting her knees green.
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Tayyaba Toseef
Seeking a Cure for MS
Multiple sclerosis is a disease in which the protective myelin sheath surrounding nerves is destroyed, which severely limits normal nerve function and causes cognitive and motor defects. Myelin is like the insulation surrounding electric wires; if it's destroyed, the wires can't function properly.
Tayyaba Toseef, a master's student at Hunter College, is pursuing basic science research that could point the way toward therapies that may reverse the degenerative process in MS patients and regrow the myelin that their central nervous systems have lost.
The National Science Foundation has awarded her a three-year, $126,000 Graduate Research Fellowship to pursue this research. It is considered the most prestigious grant for graduate students in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
Toseef's NSF research proposal aims for a better understanding of how oligodendrocytes - cells that myelinate neurons (that is, put the insulation on nerves) in the central nervous system - function over the course of brain development. Her goal is to knock out a key gene that governs formation of oligodendrocytes and then compare myelination in normal mice and those missing the gene.
Working under the mentorship of Hunter assistant professor Carmen Melendez-Vasquez, Toseef is enthusiastic to start this new project.
"If we can identify the molecular mechanisms involved in nerve myelination, we can manipulate them to occur in adulthood and induce remyelination in conditions where myelin is depleted," she says.
She began elementary school in her native Pakistan and then in Saudi Arabia. Her family moved to Delaware when she was in fifth grade, and she lived there until earning her bachelor's degree in biology from Delaware State University in 2011.
Toseef has previously worked on two other projects studying brain development. As an undergraduate, she was a research assistant studying the role of progesterone receptors during development of a rat hindbrain structure.
She also received a post-baccalaureate fellowship to do clinical research in the Rehabilitation Medicine Department at the National Institutes of Health. Interested in seeing firsthand the application of basic science research in a clinical setting, she got involved in several projects. In one, she analyzed muscle strength and function in therapy protocol for post-operative breast cancer patients.
"I enjoyed working at NIH and in clinical biology, but my primary passion was always basic science research," she says. "Hunter College seemed a good fit."
Toseef hopes to enter a Ph.D. program to pursue a career in academic research. In addition to lab and coursework, she is involved in several volunteer activities in the scientific community, such as conducting classroom demonstrations of neuroscience topics for fifth graders in Harlem Central Middle School.
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Jake Vaynshteyn
Taking on the Brain
The cerebral cortex - the outermost layer of neural tissue on the brain that plays a modulatory role in memory, perception, attention, thought, language and consciousness - may represent the pinnacle of engineering. It's also the launching pad for a million questions.
"How does the cingulate cortex - a portion of the cerebral cortex that is involved with forming and processing emotion, as well as learning and memory - affect the reward circuit, for example," asks Jake V. Vaynshteyn (City College, B.E., 2009). "In order to look at that, you need to look not just on the molecular scale, but on the circuit scale and on the behavioral scale."
Vaynshteyn intends to refine his research topic as a first-year doctoral student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University with the support of a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The three-year, $126,000 grant is the most prestigious award for graduate study in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
"I'm proud to say that I'm from City College and the Grove School of Engineering because they take their engineering very seriously. They craft your mind to solve problems," he says.
But his experience working for two years after graduation as a technician at Rockefeller University shifted his interest from solving problems to asking the kinds of questions that neuroscientists pose. "I really got interested in seeing what the fundamentals are in the brain," he says.
One guide in this journey was a postdoctoral student in a molecular genetics laboratory at Rockefeller. The postdoc needed help setting up a system in which she could test animals; with his engineering background, he got her going. "They were using techniques that were mind-blowing and caught my interest," he says.
He points to the work of Rockefeller professors Nathaniel Heintz and Jeffrey Friedman as having played a role in persuading him to pursue his own research. Heintz designed the translating ribosome affinity purification (TRAP) technique, which identifies how types of cells respond to genetic changes or drug interventions; that led to the definition of biomechanical pathways whose altered activity points to central nervous system disorders.
For the moment, however, Vaynshteyn is rotating through various laboratories and has not yet chosen which one will give him the tools he needs to learn.
Vaynshteyn was born in the Soviet Union to parents who were artists "but decided they were not willing to paint Soviet regime propaganda" and moved to France and then to Utah before settling in New York when he was ready for junior high school. He started at Queens College as a mathematics major and then became interested in biomedical engineering, which led him to City College.
While at Queens, he met and ultimately married Wendy Sanchez, who had a dual major in chemistry and computer science and sought to combine her interests in biomedical engineering. She also switched to the Grove School. They worked on his senior project together, designing a system that allows Boston Scientific scientists to measure shear stresses induced by fluid flow on endothelial cells (normally found inside blood vessels) that were grown on stainless steel. She earned her B.E. degree the year after he did, 2010.
The couple, who have two sons, aged 3 and 19 months, are at Einstein. Wendy Sanchez Vaynshteyn now works as a laboratory technician three floors down from where he is doing his rotations.
"She understands the workload, and we can have lunch together," Vaynshteyn says. "She's a vital influence on me and has made me the skeptical scientist that I am today. Without her, I would have never pursued science."
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Samsiya Ona
The Right Rx
Samsiya Ona (Lehman College, B.A. and B.S. summa cum laude in biology and anthropology/biology/chemistry, 2011) had never heard of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, so when a Harvard Medical School classmate asked whether this Togo-born student was applying for it, she decided to ask her mentors.
"I'm a second-year student. The days are hectic because of all the work we have to do, and the application deadline was just about two weeks away," she recalls.
Her professors and mentors quickly agreed to write letters of support and help her with her application, while a classmate who had previously won the fellowship offered advice.
The result: She has up to $90,000 to support her graduate education over two years, including tuition, room, board and expenses. More than 1,050 applicants applied for only 30 fellowships, which are awarded on the basis of merit to new Americans - either permanent residents or naturalized citizens if born abroad, or the children of naturalized citizens - who are college seniors or early in their graduate programs.
"It's an incredible honor," Ona says. "I have scholarships from Harvard to cover almost all of my tuition, but I've had to take loans for housing and living expenses. This fellowship will make a big difference."
Ona and her three siblings came to the United States when she was 18 to join their father in the South Bronx. She knew little English, although she was fluent in French and the African languages Ewe and Kotokoli. Dreaming of being a physician, she enrolled in a noncredit English class at Hunter College and, some months later, at Lehman College.
Told that she couldn't possibly be accepted to medical school with her limited English, she enrolled in a pre-nursing program. "I started to think, 'Why did I come here? Maybe I should go back home to Togo,'" she has said.
But professor Gary Schwartz, director of the Lehman Scholars Program, the campus' honor program, responded to what he has called Ona's "deft, agile and receptive intellect. Not one of my students has ever shown as much willingness to share her gifts with other students, unstintingly offering tutoring support to those in need."
In her sophomore year, Ona switched to the premed program.
She won two awards from the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation in Science Research, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, to conduct environmental health research in Colombia and urology and neuroscience research in the Netherlands. Colombia, she says, was like Togo in terms of health care, for physicians were in short supply, nurses provided most of the care, and the costs were high.
Schwartz, Dr. Irwin Dannis from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and 1995 Lehman graduate Elliot Melendez, a Harvard Medical School alumnus, encouraged her to apply to Harvard. She got in there, as she did at the eight other medical schools to which she applied.
At Harvard, Ona was co-president of Women of Color in Medicine and Dentistry. She participated in a summer project in Zambia, helping to pilot a preventive health initiative for children.
"I was taking basic information on health status through screenings for my mentor's NGO [Dr. Richard Bail founded Communities Without Borders, which educates orphans and vulnerable children in Africa]. My supervisor was Dr. Lise Johnson [a Harvard Medical School instructor and director of Well Newborn Nurseries at Brigham and Women's Hospital], who started the NGO's Healthy Learners Program. I also helped provide treatment when needed. Before establishing permanent health-care services, we first needed to determine what areas of preventive care to focus on," she says.
She is doing her third-year clerkships at Massachusetts General Hospital and has her eye on a career in primary care.
"I want to be in a field that's broad enough to be of use to the greatest amount of people, and that's primary care," she says.
She also is interested in infectious diseases but says it is too early in her training to know which specialty she may go into.
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Alla Zamarayeva
Going with the Flow
Alla Zamarayeva had a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Vienna-Kiev when she arrived at City College, but she had come to the United States from Ukraine to become a chemical engineer and was willing to start over.
Judging by her receipt of a federally funded 2013 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship in her junior year, that was a good decision.
She received one of only 272 scholarships awarded to college juniors and seniors around the country to encourage research careers in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields; faculty members nominated 1,107 applicants for this highly competitive scholarship. The scholarship covers up to $7,500 a year in undergraduate tuition, fees, books and room and board, with seniors getting one year of support and juniors two years.
Fluent in English, she plunged into research at City College, a school she had chosen for its quality engineering program and affordability. Since March 2011, she has been a Partnership for Research and Education in Materials Fellow. She has contributed to two journal articles on stretchable and flexible alkaline batteries and three research projects on batteries for hybrid electric propulsion systems.
The battery work took place during the four semesters she was an undergraduate research assistant at the CUNY Energy Institute. She worked under the guidance of assistant professor Dan Steingart, who is now at Princeton University. Zamarayeva intends to spend the summer of 2013 with him at Princeton, working on novel batteries or carbon-free energy devices, thanks to a federally funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates grant.
At City College, she studies at the Benjamin Levich Institute for Physicochemical Hydrodynamics with chemical engineering professor Jeff Morris, who also is principal investigator of the Complex Fluids Group. Her current research examines the effect of capillary bridges on suspension rheology.
Suspension rheology is the study of the flow of fluids containing suspended materials. Water molecules are attracted to one another and to molecules in solids, which explains why they can rise against gravity through capillary action, as is seen on the inside surface of a plastic straw that contains water. When small amounts of water are added to a suspension of solid particles in a fluid, capillary action can transform the water into a bridge, a process that can change the suspension into a gel, whose flow properties are dramatically different. Understanding how capillary bridges work has practical benefits, such as for pull-off adhesives, as well as for understanding why sand castles stick together.
Zamarayeva is the incoming president of the Lambda Chapter of Omega Chi Epsilon, the National Chemical Engineering Honors Society, and is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, American Nuclear Society and Golden Key International Honour Society.
Volunteering with the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, she has brought public middle-school students to City College laboratories in hopes of interesting them in science; many of them are from minority groups that are underrepresented in scientific fields.
Similarly, she volunteered in a U.S. Navy-sponsored underwater robotics competition for public school students.
"It was fun," she says. "They had to learn to work in a team and present a poster about their robots. Teamwork is essential for engineers."
Zamarayeva looks forward to moving on to a doctoral program and is uncertain whether she will seek a career in academia or industry.
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Nicolas Montano
Advocating for Justice
Nicolas Montano, a senior in the CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has been awarded a prestigious 2013 British Marshall Scholarship to study in the United Kingdom. He is the first John Jay student - and one of only six CUNY students to have ever received a Marshall Scholarship.
Marshall Scholarships provide high-achieving students from the United States with the opportunity to pursue studies at the graduate level in the United Kingdom. Only 40 students are selected annually. The scholarships are named in honor of U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall.
"I decided to attend John Jay because of its mission of educating for justice," he says. "No other school I looked at had justice as its primary focus. Now I am really excited and proud to represent John Jay and to take with me all that the college stands for and to have an impact in another country and institution."
When he completed his undergraduate degree in Psychology of Juvenile Delinquency and International Criminology in spring 2013, Montano, headed to England to begin two graduate programs - a master's degree in Research Methods in Social Policy and Sociology at the University of Liverpool, followed by a master's degree in Criminal Justice Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The Marshall Scholarship will cover tuition costs and living expenses for his two years abroad.
While at John Jay, Montano's research and volunteer interests have focused on youth and community justice.
Montano also won the Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellowship in recognition of his academic excellence and was selected as a scholar in the Ronald E. McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program. He is a John Jay-Vera Fellow and a New York Needs You Fellow. In 2012, he participated in the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Latino Leadership Initiative Program. He was a student in the John Jay College Honors Program and is a member of the Psi Chi International Honor Society.
In the spring 2013 semester, Montano collaborated with Professor Jana Arsovska on her research project, "Culture, Migration and Transnational Crime."
Montano was inspired to be a fierce advocate for justice at an early age. His family was affected by El Salvador's civil war. Growing up in Spring Valley, New York, he also witnessed the consequences of poverty, limited educational opportunities and the absence of youth support systems.
At 14, he joined ASPIRA, a national organization that develops the educational and leadership capacity of Hispanic youth. He eventually became the president of the ASPIRA chapter in Spring Valley. He has served as a mentor to other youths through his internships at the South Bronx Community Connections for Youth and at Common Justice, a project of the Vera Institute of Justice. While on family trips to El Salvador, he also has helped to teach English and enhance youth outreach programs.
Montano plans to earn a Ph.D. to continue his passion for research and academia.
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Josue Cordones
Adding Up the Language of Math
Josué Cordones had always thought about teaching, and "when I started reflecting on which teachers stood out the most for me and had made the greatest impact, the teachers who always came to mind were my math teachers."
Cordones (Lehman College, B.A. in mathematics, summa cum laude with departmental honors, 2013, and Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society) is on a path to become a great math teacher. He is one of only 17 students from across the nation to receive the extraordinarily competitive $100,000 Math for America (MƒA) Fellowship.
This five-year program supports outstanding mathematics students who commit to teaching in New York City's public secondary schools. Winners get part of the stipend while earning a three-semester master's degree in secondary mathematics education at City College of New York and during their first four years of teaching, in addition to the regular teacher's salary. This long-term payout is designed to retain new teachers during the most stressful first years in the classroom, when attrition is highest.
The MƒA program provides a rich clinical training experience to prepare fellows for the rigors of the New York City classroom. MƒA also offers mentoring and professional development, since a lack of support is a key factor in decisions to quit teaching.
MƒA is a privately funded nonprofit organization that operates in seven U.S. cities. The 2013 winners include another CUNY graduate, Razia Khan (Queens College, 2013), along with graduates of Brown, Columbia, Georgetown, Haverford, U.C.-Berkeley and other leading colleges and universities.
Born in the Dominican Republic, Cordones and his family came to New York when he was 3 or 4 years old. He grew up in Harlem, went to public schools and enjoyed playing basketball for relaxation "but not for the past four years, since I've been studying," he adds with a laugh.
Cordones pursued automotive training while at Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School but always was in the academic track.
"Automotive was not my passion," he says. Mathematics, however, "is a beautiful language. It describes a lot of things in life. I'm particularly interested in number theory and group theory and enjoy calculus, which is applicable math and is really cool."
At Lehman, professor Melvyn Nathanson, who taught him linear and abstract algebra, "made me enjoy math. His way of teaching and lectures and his dedication to math opened my eyes. He really pushes you to think and enjoy the subject."
He also credits assistant professor Robert Schneiderman (City College 1994), who helped him prepare for the two MƒA -required Praxis exams and advised him on his MƒA application. "Professor Schneiderman is why I'm in MƒA," he says.
Speaking in late June, he said that he found his first week of master's degree classes "intensive and different from what I did as an undergraduate. We're looking at the sociological aspects of teaching as well as literacy and language in the classroom and differentiating instruction for students with different needs and abilities. I've already learned a tremendous amount about education."
He says the program won't get into actual teaching methods until the fall, when he and the other MƒA students will begin teaching in the public schools under the guidance of mentors.
He's excited about getting to teach secondary-school students, such as he was not so long ago. "What better way to give back to your community than to teach?" he says.
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Razia Khan
Making the Numbers Work
When Razia Khan arrived at Queens College, she planned on going into pharmacy, but then she began studying mathematics. When she got a job tutoring math at the Renaissance Charter School in Jackson Heights, "I enjoyed every moment of it. I didn't feel as if I was going to work. I began to see my presence making an impact on my students' lives and decided that teaching was for me."
Khan (Queens College, B.A. in applied mathematics in the science track, minor in computer information technology, 2013) is one of only 17 students from across the country to receive a $100,000 Math for America (MƒA) Fellowship.
This highly selective program trains outstanding mathematics students to teach in New York City's public secondary schools. The stipend starts with the three-semester master's degree in secondary mathematics education at The City College of New York and continues over the first four years of teaching. The stipend supplements the regular salary as an incentive to persevere during the early years, when new teachers are most likely to quit.
MƒA, which also offers continuing mentoring and professional development, operates in seven U.S. cities. The 2013 New York winners include Josué C. Cordones of Lehman College, along with graduates of Brown, Columbia, Georgetown, Haverford, the University of California-Berkeley and other leading colleges and universities.
Khan's family emmigrated from Bangladesh when she was 1. She attended the private Al-Iman School in Jamaica, Queens, the first pre-K-through-12 Islamic school in America. She married Tanveer Khan after high school, took three years off and then enrolled at Queens College, where she won the Mitarotonda Scholarship Endowment for Science and Business.
"It is due to my family's support that I have made it so far," she says. In addition, "I have had superb math professors. I would find myself at the front of the classroom, wide-eyed, waiting for the amazing magic of numbers to unfold before me."
Alan Sultan, Fern Sisser, Steven Kahan, Kenneth Kramer and Al-Karim Gangji are just a few of the math instructors "who inspired my decision to be an educator. Their passion for teaching is translucent and simply contagious."
Even as Khan became entranced with mathematics, her experience in a polyglot public university expanded her contact with and understanding of the broader world.
"The way I was brought up, I hung out primarily with Muslim students," she says.
But as a freshman, she encountered CERRU, the college's Center for Ethnic, Racial and Religious Understanding, where students address difficult issues through dialogue and interaction.
Now, "I am more open to being close to people from diverse backgrounds," she says. "As a participant and facilitator, I have listened to people from different cultural and religious backgrounds about their views and their experiences. We have more in common than we think. Instead of feeding off of the media and stereotypes, we can learn so much more by simply communicating with another on an individual basis. This is the key to improving our society, locally and globally. I hope to take this set of skills to my classrooms and teach a thing or two to my students - and learn a thing or two from them."
CERRU awarded Khan its Uncommon Courage Award, which reflects efforts to combat intolerance, overcoming stereotypes and promoting understanding. Khan declines to discuss the award. "I'm not deserving of it," she says.
As for the MƒA fellowship, she says that "it's a blessing from God."
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Melody Mills
Saving Lima's Street Girls
Melody Mills (Macaulay Honors College at Baruch College, B.A. in psychology and political science, 2014) sees potential in the "street girls" of Lima, Peru, despite their tenuous circumstances. Living on the capital's streets, the girls are exploited as child labor, and drug addiction — many sniff cheap glue called Teracol — is common.
While studying abroad in Lima in Spring 2013, Mills volunteered to tutor, mentor and teach dance to street girls who had agreed to live at Institute Mundo Libre, a private drug rehabilitation facility. Inspired by that work, and a study she conducted then, Mills has been awarded a 2014-15 U.S. Student Fulbright Study/Research Award to track the girls' "educational trajectories" after the program.
"I want to see how girls who graduate the program compare, and what advice can be gathered to better prepare them, and give these girls more resources to continue their education," says Mills, whose passion is "working in education of children with social disadvantages."
Many of the 12- to 17-year-olds at Mundo Libre are runaways from Lima's poorer neighborhoods. Mills' Spanish fluency — her mother is from Argentina, and Mills spoke Spanish at home in Brooklyn — helped her connect with the girls, whom she mentored while she attended Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP).
Last year, Mills compared the educational motivations of 16- and 17-year-old girls at Mundo Libre with girls the same age attending PUCP. The results: Both groups "were highly motivated to gain a college education," Mills wrote in her Fulbright grant request.
Her Fulbright project, "Educational Trajectories of Street-Living Girls of Lima: Focus on Instituto Mundo Libre," will employ an "advocacy/participatory/critical action" method that will allow the girls themselves to "design questions, collect data, analyze information, or reap rewards of the research."
Mills credits Macaulay and Baruch with sparking her interests. Macaulay's Opportunities Fund paid for her Peru semester and a previous semester in Ghana, where she taught in elementary schools and initiated girls' sports.
Following her nine-month Fulbright stay in Lima, Mills plans to earn a master's in "education policy or leadership," she says. "The Fulbright will help me home in on what to do."
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program, administered by the Department of State to increase understanding between U.S. citizens and those of other countries, offers fellowships for study, research and/or teaching English abroad. A stipend covers living expenses.
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Cristina Mihailescu
Seeking Global Solutions
Born and raised in what she calls "the tormented years of the communist era" in Romania, Cristina Mihailescu was inspired by her mother, who died early but set an unforgettable example by raising her and her sister as a single mother while also caring for her own parents amid food shortages, electrical outages and poverty. "There was no freedom of choice. We lived in fear," she recalls.
She began learning English — and the compulsory Russian ("which was forced, so I'm not good at it") — in middle school, as she also began searching for a way out. In 1989, as a bloody revolution ousted the dictatorship, she remembers "running in the streets with other students, despite our parents' pleading to not go out. But it started with the younger generation that couldn't take it anymore."
Then she finally got a passport, signed on with an American cruise line, traveled the world and, eventually, made her way to the United States. She started a family — her daughters are 7 and 10 — before enrolling at LaGuardia Community College in 2011. Despite being older than many students (she's now 40), she threw herself into campus life, participating in the Model U.N., joining in the CUNY challenge to find ways of reducing child mortality rates and being on the student honor advisory committee.
Mihailescu is graduating in Spring 2014, having proceeded at a slow 12 credits a semester because that's all the tuition she could afford after losing her status as a resident and having to become an international student at far higher tuition. She has been accepted by Baruch College and is waiting to hear from private universities.
However, now she won't have to worry about the cost of her baccalaureate, thanks to a 2014 Jack Kent Cooke Transfer Scholarship. This highly competitive, privately funded scholarship provides 85 of the nation's top community college students with as much as $30,000 a year for up to three years of baccalaureate study.
She intends to study economics "because the socioeconomic events of my childhood have had a great impression on me. It's such a cliché, but I want to make the world a better place — finding a solution that will help all the nations reach economic prosperity while promoting social responsibility and protecting the environment for future generations. We have to gather globally to find solutions for global problems."
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Andrew Marcus
Making NYC a Better Place
Andrew Marcus, a 2014 valedictorian from Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, graduates with a double major in math and physics. He's even conducting research in the lab of Hunter professor Steve Greenbaum, using nuclear magnetic resonance instruments to evaluate materials that can improve electrical batteries.
"I enjoy math and physics, but what I care about is making the city a better place," he says. As an undergraduate, he interned with the Mayor's Office and the NYC Economic Development Corp., took Macaulay honors seminars about New York City, was inspired by speakers at Roosevelt House like former Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch and traveled to China to see how six cities operate in a developing nation ("They're 100 years behind us in regulation," such as of environmental pollution).
With his selection as a New York City Urban Fellow, Marcus will have the opportunity to work in a government agency and perhaps affect the development and implementation of policy. "I want to stay in public service. Most people come into government studying political science. I bring a different perspective, and it's increasingly important for cities to know about science and technology."
For example, Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced a request for proposals to turn 9,100 outmoded pay phones on the streets of the five boroughs into 21st-century Wi-Fi communications kiosks.
Marcus grew up talking educational policy at the dinner table with his parents, who are both teachers in the public school system. Eventually, he says, he's likely to go to graduate school, although he's not certain in which field. "In the long term, I could see myself in elected office. We'll see what happens."
The nationally competitive New York City Urban Fellowship is a nine-month program that introduces participants to local government and public service. Fellows work in a New York City government agency, take seminars in urban issues and travel to Albany and Washington, D.C., to discuss government structure and finance with public officials. It offers a $30,000 stipend and health insurance.
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Yueting Chen
CLIP, ASAP and Top Transfer Award
If Yueting Chen had stayed in Fuzhou, China, beyond her first year of college, she would have remained an English major. But at Queensborough Community College she discovered biochemistry, which she is pursuing as a junior at SUNY Stony Brook.
Now she has the support of a highly competitive 2014 Jack Kent Cooke Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship. This privately funded award provides 85 of the nation's top community college students with up to $30,000 a year for up to three years of baccalaureate study.
In 2009, Chen and her older sister received long-awaited permission to leave China to join their mother, who had moved to New York more than a decade before. Her younger sister followed in 2011. Since her studies in China had not emphasized conversation, Chen started with CUNY's Language Immersion Program (CLIP).
The three sisters would all enroll in Queensborough's Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP). University-wide, ASAP has achieved national prominence for helping more than half of its participants earn associate degrees within three years, compared to 16 percent nationally. Chen graduated in January 2014. Elder sister Yueqing graduated in 2013 with a degree in business administration. Younger sister Yueli is a current student.
"I appreciate the professors and ASAP at Queensborough. They have supported me and made me become a better person," she says.
Chen credits her switch to chemistry to Queensborough professor Paris Svoronos, who became her mentor "and made me promise to become a professor or medical doctor." With his encouragement, she took honors courses in chemistry, biology and mathematics, maintained a 3.9 GPA and secured two internships that led to poster presentations at the American Chemical Society's Northeast Regional Meeting at Yale University in October 2013.
One presentation discussed research done with another Queensborough student. They analyzed water samples for nitrogen pollutants that could have come from New York City wastewater treatment plants; they also measured chlorophyll levels in plants which, if too high, could compromise organisms higher up the food chain.
The other presentation involved research done in Summer 2013 with Stony Brook professor J. Peter Gergen. She examined the genetic mechanism involved in heart development in Drosophila, the common fruit fly. Although a fly's heart is much simpler than a mammal's, both develop by using similar genetically driven regulatory proteins.
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Danny Ramos
Teaching from Experience
Danny Ramos experienced the insult of low expectations in high school. A counselor mistakenly warned that he wouldn't succeed in honors physics, then erred just as badly by admitting him to AP calculus only on academic probation. Thanks to a supportive teacher, he scored a 5 in calc, the highest grade.
A child of Mexican immigrants and the first in his family to graduate from college, Ramos (Hunter College, 2014) intends to keep these experiences in mind when he, himself, stands in front of the whiteboard as a New York City public high school mathematics teacher.
He is preparing for this career with the help of a rare Math for America (MƒA) Fellowship. This highly competitive award pays for a three-semester master's in secondary mathematics education at City College. It also provides a $100,000 stipend spread over five years, including the first four years of teaching, in addition to the regular teacher's salary. This long-term payout aims to retain new teachers during the stressful first years in the classroom, when attrition is highest.
Ramos understands his high school counselor's hesitation. "I could never explain myself when the teacher asked how I got an answer. I'd say, 'I just saw it.' I was not the best student. My studying was explaining math to my friends, and I think I'm good at explaining now."
He credits his AP math teacher at New Utrecht High School, Dieudonne Egotanda, with having prepared him for the AP and college level math. "Before the exam, he said I could get a 5 and I said, whoa - maybe a 3 or a 4. I wasn't used to somebody expecting so much for me. He prepared me well and gave me the confidence that I needed. He's the kind of math teacher I want to be."
After high school, Ramos tutored and taught math, English and science in after-school and summer programs run by the Brooklyn Chinese-American Association. "That's where I started seeing myself as a teacher." At Hunter, he tutored at the Mary P. Dolciani Math Learning Center and was selected for the Thomas Hunter Honors Program.
His love of math started at home. "When I was a young kid, my dad would make me memorize and recite multiplication tables randomly in both English and Spanish," he recalls. "From the beginning, I was trying to figure out a pattern.
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Chantal Adlam
Seeking Cures in Medicinal Plants
After Category 5 Hurricane Ivan devastated her native Jamaica in 2004, Chantal Adlam saw her grandmother use medicinal plants to treat an outbreak of waterborne diseases. "It's a practice passed down generation to generation, but there's not enough research being done to advise on the effectiveness of plants," says Adlam (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, B.S. in forensic toxicology, 2014).
As she begins studies toward a Ph.D. in organic and analytical chemistry at SUNY Stony Brook, with a full tuition waiver and a $100,000-plus W. Burghardt Turner Fellowship from the university, she says her "ultimate vision is to travel to underrepresented regions of the world and train young scientists to identify medicinal plants and utilize them as a method of lowering the cost of health care there. There are a lot of parasitic diseases plaguing those areas, and they're neglected diseases because pharmaceutical companies do not devote resources toward finding cures. So as I study, I wish to help mitigate health incongruities that fall along ethnic, socioeconomic and national lines."
Adlam started higher education at Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she completed the forensic science program in two years and transferred to John Jay. "I met incredible people at BMCC," she says.
At John Jay she found a mentor in Anthony Carpi, a professor of environmental toxicology and chemistry, who invited her to research mercury in the environment. "I've done computational chemistry to determine how various hydrates of mercury degrade in the environment," she says. She sought ones that are most likely to release toxic elemental mercury as they disperse in water and are degraded by sunlight. She presented her work at the 2013 Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students, the largest professional conference for minority students who intend to pursue advanced training in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
Her studies at Stony Brook will begin with rotation through various laboratories, as she looks for the mentor who can best help her learn to synthesize drugs derived from plants. "Plants are the source of a lot of drugs on the market, but I've found that most are synthetic. Parasites have evolved to evade treatment with these synthetic drugs, and I feel you have to revert to the natural product to combat these diseases." One example is schistosomiasis, a sometimes deadly disease caused by a waterborne parasite that affects more than 200 million people in Africa, Asia and South America. Her contribution to the scientific community, she says, "is to understand and advance not only my community and my country, but humanity."
SUNY Stony Brook named its version of the statewide Underrepresented Graduate Fellowship Program after W. Burghardt Turner, a former professor who was dedicated to supporting underrepresented students. This $100,000 W. Burghardt Turner Fellowship supports study in disciplines including the biological sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, medicine, humanities, engineering and the arts.
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Barukh Rohde
Attacking Killer Bacterium with Sex
Barukh Rohde thinks that sex may be the way to solve greening disease, which is souring and killing American citrus crops, tripling the price of orange juice and, in Florida alone, cost more than 6,600 jobs and at least $3.63 billion in lost revenue between 2006 and 2012.
The killer bacterium is carried by the Asian citrus psyllid, an invasive insect three millimeters long. As Rohde (Hunter College, 2014) explained last year as lead author on the first of his five publications, the bugs beat their wings to transmit mating calls through the citrus plant in order to locate one another. Rohde played recordings of these songs and found that males eagerly sought the source.
Rohde is designing a device that imitates female psyllids, with a lethal surprise waiting for the males. Could this be the better insect trap that could stop citrus greening? Rohde intends to find out with a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
He tentatively plans to enroll in an electrical engineering Ph.D. program at the University of Florida in Gainesville, home of the U.S. Department of Agriculture lab where he began work on his psyllid trap by buying the services of a U-Florida student for $11. That student, acknowledged as a coauthor on one publication, came to the lab, pointed him in the right direction and Rohde then taught himself needed skills via the Internet.
Now 20, Rohde is a prodigy who graduates with three majors (biology-bioinformatics, chemistry and statistics) and two minors (psychology and economics). He racked up an astounding 199 credits (the typical student graduates with 120), including 36.5 credits in his final semester (most take 12 to 15). Not to mention serving on the Hunter College Senate, helping to found an Undergraduate Student Government party, running study groups to aid other students and bicycling and hitchhiking cross-country.
He conducted basic research at Rockefeller University for a device that uses light to determine whether a lesion is cancerous melanoma. In a University of Pittsburgh molecular pharmacology lab, he worked to prevent a form of kidney transplant rejection. After his six-month stint in Florida, he founded a program at the USDA lab, which used the stipend normally allotted to pay one student to cover housing for seven undergrads who wanted research experience.
"I am an overloader," he says. He earned his high school diploma (from the University of Missouri) online while living in Israel, taking nine high school courses in his last year to graduate a year early. His diploma is dated two days before his Hunter start date. "When you push your limits, you'll often find that you are capable of more than you initially think."
With his prodigious capacity for learning and eclectic interests, Rohde makes clear that while his career may be starting with sex-hungry insects, it easily could spiral into any number of as-yet unknown fields. "No matter what I do, I will definitely have fun," he says.
The National Science foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This federal grant provides $132,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
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Ariela Hazan
Plunging into Another Culture
Ariela Hazan (Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, B.S. in biology, 2014) wants to be a physician, but the long medical school road will have to wait. Hazan will take a detour to Taiwan, where she'll teach English in the southwestern city of Kaohsiung as the recipient of a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship.
"I wanted to take a chance to try and get close to another culture before I start my medical career," says Hazan. "I thought this would be an opportune time to do this. Once in medical school it will be hard to take a break."
Segueing between languages and cultures is nothing new for Hazan. Daughter of an Israeli father who is a table tennis coach, Hazan is fluent in Hebrew and studied Chinese for four years in high school. "So I know some Chinese, and hopefully it will get better," she says. Her Fulbright opportunity also offers Hazan a chance to explore her interest in Ping-Pong; "I was brought up with it," she points out.
Hazan has some English teaching experience as a volunteer with the We Are New York program of the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. And thanks to the Macaulay Opportunities Fund, she studied abroad for a month in China and a month in Scotland during college.
At Hunter, Hazan, biology major, also received a two-year Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scholarship to work in a faculty mentor's laboratory where she researched the potentially modulating effects of neurotensin, an endogenous neuropeptide, on the toxic effects of methamphetamine use.
For now, Hazan looks forward to exploring new interests in Taiwan: "I'm going with an open mind."
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program, administered by the Department of State to increase understanding between U.S. citizens and those of other countries, offers fellowships for study, research and/or teaching English abroad. A stipend covers living expenses.
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William Cheung
Developing a Philosophical Approach
William Cheung (CUNY Baccalaureate, history of philosophy/continental philosophy, 2014) is a scholar of philosophy and the German language, a champion policy debater and debate coach. His latest distinction, a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Germany, dovetails with those passions.
"I hope to translate what I learn from this experience into graduate school and a dissertation on German Idealism and ethics, while still keeping an eye toward my own experiences and how globalized, multicultural societies demand new ethical paradigms," Cheung says.
A Canarsie, Brooklyn, native who was based at Brooklyn College for his CUNY Baccalaureate and took almost every philosophy course offered there, Cheung says he looks forward to interacting with German high school or college students in Bavaria "from the perspective of a multicultural New Yorker while teaching both the English language and American culture and politics. I think it might strike some German students as surprising at first to see an Asian-American in their classroom representing the United States, but I think this interacting is especially important in order to speak across people's differences," he says.
Cheung has been captivated by philosophy, and with the German language, since his youth, starting when he persuaded an Austrian math teacher to tutor him in German and took classes "after giving my 'pragmatic' immigrant parents an insistent argument on the practical applications of German," he wrote in his Fulbright grant application. German writers like Goethe and Rilke "have shaped my life and aided my finding a place in a multicultural world," he says.
Cheung has also coached minority students in debating public policy issues, honing their critical thinking and research skills and involving them in the political process. A national-level collegiate policy debater and an award-winning speaker, he looks ahead to the Fulbright post as "a unique opportunity for me to work with students to develop better communicative and pedagogical models."
Cheung plans to enter graduate school in 2016, "study theory and philosophy in the interest of mostly ethics and minority students," and ultimately become a professor.
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program, administered by the Department of State to increase understanding between U.S. citizens and those of other countries, offers fellowships for study, research and/or teaching English abroad. A stipend covers living expenses.
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Simone Gordon
Learning "From How We Teach"
Simone Gordon (City College, BS in childhood education, 2014), sees similarities between the United States and India when it comes to the educational problems — including high dropout rates — faced by low-income children. As she embarks on a nine-month Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Calcutta, Gordon hopes her teaching and research there will enable her "to make a difference" for both her Indian and American students.
A native of Jamaica who emigrated to New York at age 6, Gordon sought a Fulbright posting in India — where she will teach English literature and grammar to middle school students — because of the opportunity there to blend teaching with research. She plans to compare classroom practices, strategies and student-teacher dynamics, as well as cultural and economic factors in India and New York, to discover "what we can learn ... from how we teach.
"I am intimately aware of the effects of gender, ethnicity and financial and social status on a student's academic progress," Gordon wrote in her Fulbright grant proposal. ... I am especially interested in making a difference in one of India's schools while learning from its educators, whose efforts have been crucial to India's educational reforms and achievements."
Gordon has wanted to teach since third grade at P.S. 135 in Queens Village. "I had a really inspiring teacher," she says. "She showed that she cared about her students," motivating them to do better. "I want to do that for somebody else."
At City College, where she earned a B.S. in childhood education with a social studies concentration, Gordon held student government posts, participated in the Colin Powell Fellowship Program and received public service and leadership honors. Through a CCNY study abroad program, she spent a rewarding month teaching English to 4- and 5-year-olds in Morocco.
Now, Gordon says, she looks forward to India — "the food, the history, everything, fully immersing myself in that community."
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program, administered by the Department of State to increase understanding between U.S. citizens and those of other countries, offers fellowships for study, research and/or teaching English abroad. A stipend covers living expenses.
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Hanifah Walidah
2014 Grad a Musical Révélation
After Hanifah Walidah's dynamic performance with the French electro-soul band St. Lô at a top European festival, TransMusicales de Rennes, the newspaper Le Monde dubbed the group it's 2012 "TransMusicales Révélation" — a recognition that it previously bestowed on Nirvana, Bjork and Lenny Kravits.
Meanwhile, Walidah, a native New Yorker, also was immersed in revelations of her own contriving, thanks to Borough of Manhattan Community College and the CUNY Baccalaureate program, from which she graduates magna cum laude with a 2014 degree in popular culture and collaborative media.
During most of her 20-year career as a musician, playwright, filmmaker, educator and social arts activist, she called living the best education, "but I was muffling the small voices that wanted a traditional education. Being able to access a wealth of information I could apply to the life I live, that really hit it on the head for me. It was the joy of learning and the immediate application of what I learned" that resonate most.
Speaking after a gig in Belgium that she squeezed in before commencement, she said she learned about the CUNY BA program at BMCC from a poster featuring James Dean. She chose it for baccalaureate work "because of the flexibility not just in self-designing your own major, but the flexibility in changing your mind. You can think you want to learn one thing and realize you have to pivot."
She has pivoted frequently. She co-directed the award-winning 2008 rockumentary "U People," in which 30 women of color who span sexualities and gender expression discuss gay and straight relations within the black community after they have made an MTV-Logo music video. Her one-woman show and feature-length film "Black Folks' Guide to Black Folks" stimulated conversations among gay and straight communities of color. She helped found the Rivers of Honey theater cabaret. And she debuted as hip-hop artist Sha-Key in 1994, sang and composed for the soul-reggae band Brooklyn Funk Essentials, recorded singles and albums and much more — most recently St. Lô's first album, "Room 415."
Two standout performances of Walidah's work are the hip-hop song "Sweatback" and the theatrical-soul number "Legendary".
Walidah says Hunter anthropology professor Jonathan Shannon deeply influenced her study of pop culture and collaborative media. "I realized that the important question is not just why someone creates art, but how the artist's footprint affects others," she says.
With other mentors, she blended anthropology, African studies, music, history and media into an ethnographic approach to the arts and social change: Hunter music professor Barbara Hampton, who has written about African and African-American traditional and popular music and women musicians; Baruch associate professor Kyra Gaunt, for whom she worked social media in a project involving conversations about race and racism; Brooklyn associate professor and saxophonist Michael Salim Washington, who coordinates jazz studies; and Hunter film-media studies assistant professor Bill D. Herman, who supported her independent studies with digital media and copyright and with whom she first sketched the ideas for yaHeard, her music tech startup.
She developed yaHeard at City College's Zahn Innovation Center, where she made it to the semifinals in a funding competition and later launched on her own. At YaHeard.co, the shared photo experiences from one show become artists' invitation for the next. YaHeard, Walidah explains, "captures the special relationship that bands already have with their fans to help these artists with their online promotional needs." It's aimed at artists "who are doing two or three shows a month in this town and touring regularly, making enough of an income to think of how they can build on that and sustain themselves."
Down the line, Walidah expects to seek a master's or doctorate, but for now, she's heading to France for a summer tour with St. Lô.
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Bennett Callaghan
Mind Play: How We Choose Candidates
Bennett Callaghan (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 2012), a social psychology doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, received a 2014 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to study socioeconomic status and the political process.
"Researchers have found that we all judge people on two dimensions of competence and warmth," he says. "Warmth is: Can I trust this person? Are they looking out for my best interest? Competence is: Once you establish a person's intentions, do you believe they will carry them out?
"Our hypothesis is that lower-class people are more likely to take part in the political process when it's described in terms of warmth, gravitating toward politicians they see as more trustworthy and interested in helping others. We predict that they need to trust politicians more because they feel they are more affected by what people in power decide to do."
Callaghan has begun his research by giving subjects written passages encouraging political participation. Half emphasized warm concepts (elect people who care about you); half emphasized competence (elect leaders who can get the job done). He found, so far, that higher-status participants preferred the competence message, while those with lower status opted for the warm message.
Illinois assistant professor Michael W. Kraus and Callaghan looked at the behavior of U.S. House members in an article published in January. Republicans, they found, tend to support legislation increasing economic inequality regardless of social status, while the social status of Democrats (measured by wealth, race or gender) factors significantly in their votes.
Callaghan began research as a forensic psychology major at John Jay. With assistant professor Ian Hansen, now at York College, he examined attitudes toward torture, priming study participants with varying statements that underlined the importance of self-interest, abstract moral priorities or following rules; a publication is pending.
Working on a team led by John Jay professor Evan J. Mandery, Callaghan examined data from Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions to gauge the effect of monetary compensation on exonerated prisoners. The 2013 study found that exonerees who received at least $500,000 are significantly less likely to commit crimes than those who received less or no compensation.
The National Science foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This federal grant provides $132,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
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Andre Braddy
Personalizing Math Instruction
Math always came easily to Andre Braddy. In eighth grade, he would leap for the buzzer during his teacher's weekly puzzle-solving math contest. He particularly relished trick and above-grade-level questions. When he transferred from the University of South Carolina to Medgar Evers College, from which he graduated in 2012, he switched from engineering to math. "The professors were so welcoming. You got the personalized touch," he says.
Now, with a nationally competitive 2014 Math for America Fellowship, Braddy is on his way to becoming a New York City public high school math teacher. The award covers a three-semester master's in secondary mathematics education at City College. It also provides a $100,000 stipend spread over five years, including the first four years of teaching, in addition to the regular teacher's salary. This long-term payout aims to retain new teachers during the stressful first years in the classroom, when attrition is highest.
"I like to concentrate on high school because, as a teaching assistant now, I work with a lot of calculus students. That's my specialty," he says. "In middle school, you want students to think, but you have to teach the curriculum. In high school you deal with more real-life applications, and if you come up with a different solution than I do, we can dissect the thought process so we can come up with the same answer."
Since graduating from Medgar Evers, he has worked with Medgar Evers' Frank Ragland Math Masters Institute, which prepares students at Middle School 61 in Central Brooklyn to study science, technology, engineering and math in high school. "Once you set the tone, relate to them and show them that I'm not just your instructor, I'm here to talk with you, they fall right in."
Braddy says he may enroll in a Ph.D. program somewhere down the line, but for the moment, "I like that I can get to do what I love to do, which is to teach."
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Nicola Kriefall
An Electrically Charged Fish Story
Fish like the black ghost knifefish from the Amazon are not normally found on restaurant menus, but with their ability to send and receive weak electric signals, they must appear tantalizingly attractive to knifefish of the opposite gender.
In the lab at Hunter College, junior Nicola Gabriele Kriefall — winner of a highly competitive 2014 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship — does her best to communicate with such African and Amazonian fish, sending electric signals to see how they respond. "We look at their behavior and collect testosterone and cortisol [both hormones] to see how levels correlate with their behavior," she says.
Working with psychology professor Christopher B. Braun, she is "trying to see if they use electric signals to assert social dominance — that's our hypothesis — which is why collecting cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and testosterone, which correlates with aggression and dominance, are so important."
She presented her research on whether jamming establishes social dominance in weakly electric fish at Hunter College's Undergraduate Research Conference and 42nd Annual Psychology Convention this spring.
Kriefall has been working in the lab for more than a year, starting by caring for fish and helping other students until she got her own project.
Then she began branching out.
With support from the Hunter/Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a fund for undergraduate biology majors, she will spend two months this summer at Woods Hole's Marine Biological Laboratory, an international center for research, education and training in biology biomedicine and ecology on Cape Cod.
Picking up a research project into neurodegenerative diseases that she began there last summer under the guidance of University of Illinois-Chicago assistant professor Gerardo Morfini, she will inject proteins produced by these diseases into squid neurons to see how they affect molecular mechanisms. Last summer, she used peptides that came from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease) and this summer also will work with Huntington's disease proteins.
Kriefall anticipates a career that combines marine biology, her original passion, with her newfound interest in neuroscience, perhaps looking "at the nervous systems of marine animals and doing conservation research."
Congress established the Goldwater Scholarship program in 1986 to honor the long-time senator by providing a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians and engineers by awarding scholarships to college students who intend to pursue research careers.
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Lauren Blachorsky
Understanding Neurons' Mysteries
Nothing is ever stagnant," says Lauren Blachorsky, a Macaulay Honors College at Queens College junior who was named a 2014 Barry M. Goldwater Scholar. "When you stick a tiny glass pipette into a live neuron and record what it's doing as it sends and receives information, that's unbelievably fascinating."
Congress created the highly competitive Goldwater awards to ensure a continuing source of scientists, mathematicians and engineers.
Blachorsky, a student in the Queens College Neuroscience Honors Program with a biology concentration, has conducted laboratory research since her freshman year.
Her research with Queens associate professor Carolyn Pytte and Hunter College professor Cheryl Harding investigated how mice are cognitively and behaviorally affected by exposure to mold. Blachorsky is involved in investigating the inflammatory response that results from the mold exposure, a topic with significant implications for humans because 30 to 40 percent of American buildings are estimated to be moldy.
She also has worked with Queens professor Joshua Brumberg, using the electrical physiology skills learned in a summer internship at MIT to stimulate individual neurons as part of his investigation of pyramidal neurons, which may play important roles in advanced cognitive functions.
In the summer of 2014, she expects to be at Rockefeller University working with stem cells.
"I've met people who wrote the textbooks and who had performed the experiments in the textbooks. I've realized that the research they're presenting on now won't be in textbooks for another 10 years, and that's really cool," she says.
Blachorsky looks forward to a career in neuroscience, either as a Ph.D. or as an M.D./Ph.D. "The brain makes you you. No one's neurons are the same, and the way they perform is different in every person. I love getting closer to understanding why people are the way they are," she says.
Congress established the Barry Goldwater Scholarship program in 1986 to honor the long-time senator by providing a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians and engineers by awarding scholarships to college students who intend to pursue research careers.
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Rebecca DelliCarpini
Studying Scientists Who Study Primates
At Madagascar's Ranomafana National Park, scientists study a dozen varieties of lemurs, part of the endearing, big-eyed, prosimian branch of the primate family. Thanks to a 2014 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Rebecca DelliCarpini will be there as well - studying the scientists.
"I'm interested in the way knowledge is produced in the context of conservation science," says DelliCarpini (Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, 2013), who is now a doctoral student at the University of Texas at San Antonio. "Science studies look at the way people produce knowledge and follows facts as they produce them. For me, that means going into the forest with primatologists and observing them observing primates, seeing how they come up with their end product, what is published in journals and accepted as fact."
She also will observe how scientists and local people interact, how scientific knowledge is affected by local knowledge and the impact of the interaction after the scientists complete their work.
DelliCarpini spent a semester in Madagascar, making connections with conservation scientists and park officials and getting to know the local culture. She foresees conducting pilot research in the summer of 2015 and, after finishing doctoral coursework and qualifying exams, spending all of 2017 conducting research.
She says she chose Macaulay and Hunter over Smith, Mt. Holyoke and Clark — "great schools and scholarships" — because "the academic environment was incredible, very enriching," with Hunter's place in the history of women's education and financial considerations. "At a private college, I still would have had $100,000 in debt, and now I'll graduate with a Ph.D. and have no debt whatsoever." In addition, her mother, Margo, "a champion of public education," until recently was a professor of secondary education at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
DelliCarpini adds that the training she received from Hunter assistant anthropology professor and primate ecologist Jessica Rothman prepared her for graduate study and for writing a solid application for the NSF fellowship. "She helped me understand the context of being involved with conservation and turning an analytic eye on it," she says.
The National Science foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This federal grant provides $132,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
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Leah Fredman
Exploring Roots of Fanaticism
Why are some people willing to take extreme action on behalf of a social group, either volunteering for the good of others or strapping on and detonating explosives in a crowd?
In doctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin, Leah Fredman (Lehman College, B.A. in psychology with minor in art, 2012) explores a theory that may predict extreme levels of social identification. With support from a 2014 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, she intends to study "identity fusion" in Israel, "a place of intractable conflicts" where she was raised.
"The theory of identity fusion is relatively new," says Fredman, who was born in Riverdale, the Bronx. "People who are fused view other group members as family. I'm looking at trust, because fusion is a strong predictor of trust among in-group members. There hasn't been a lot of work on pro-social behaviors in fusion — most has focused on self-sacrifice — but I'm looking at both aspects to understand the mechanics of the theory."
Individuals may fuse with any group, she says, but she believes that fusion levels in the Middle East are much higher than those Americans have with America. One prominent factor is collective trauma. "We had 9/11, but places that have continuously high levels of trauma probably have higher levels of identity fusion."
She hopes that her basic research will have practical implications for regions where group identity has become a proxy for strife rooted in financial insecurity, conflicts over sacred values and other factors that can outweigh rational behavior. "It's obvious that we are missing something. Identity fusion might be one way in which we can get a fresh view at ways to understand conflict and maybe tailor better resolutions," Fredman says. "The Middle East is pretty depressing."
Fredman, who had a perfect 4.0 GPA, said Lehman's faculty "took a personal interest in me and were there any time I had a question." She praised campus day care, which freed her time for study while nurturing her older child, now 5. "All Noam wanted to do was get bigger to go to the next classroom," she says. Her other son, Aidan, is 2.
She met her husband, Aron Wolinetz, in Israel. He earned a bachelor's in real estate at Baruch College and a master's in mathematics at Lehman. Now a Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center, he studies mathematics and computer science with Lehman Distinguished Professor Victor Pan and teaches at Lehman. "It's a long commute," Fredman says.
The National Science foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This federal grant provides $132,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
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Reilly Wilson
Children, Playgrounds and Civil War
When she worked as a nanny, Reilly Bergin Wilson spent a good deal of time in playgrounds, most of which, she says, were not interesting. "When kids interact with it in a way that goes beyond what the original designer conceived, it's called vandalism."
But since 1943 (in Denmark, during a world war), some European cities have taken a different approach — adventure playgrounds. For example, The Big Swing in Bradford, England — themed around the primal elements of earth, wind, fire and water — comes with tools, building supplies, paint and even a fire pit, so that youngsters (with adult supervision) can construct their own playgrounds and equipment.
For the past year, Wilson has volunteered at The Big Swing to supplement archival research at Leeds University, which she has attended with the help of a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship and where she is earning an MRes (master's of research) degree. "I'm looking historically at the social and political environment surrounding the introduction of these playgrounds," she says.
This work sets up her forthcoming doctoral research at the CUNY Graduate Center. Wilson (Temple University, B.A. in geography and urban studies, 2013) will carry it out with a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship that she postponed accepting last year to do the Fulbright.
Her doctoral research will focus on a very different kind of interaction with a built environment. In the 1990s Bihać, a town in northwestern Bosnia, suffered three years of siege during the multiethnic war that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia.
"Bihać was massively rebuilt in the center, but the farther away you go, the more likely you are to find bombed-out houses next door to new construction," says Wilson, who also is studying the local language. "In the post-socialist era, there has been a lot of road building, and that has significantly changed where kids can safely go and where parents feel safe letting them go. This built environment therefore affects children's experience more than a historical memory of the war."
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program, administered by the Department of State to increase understanding between U.S. citizens and those of other countries, offers fellowships for study, research and/or teaching English abroad. A stipend covers living expenses.
The National Science foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This federal grant provides $132,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
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Robert Fernandez
An Immigrant's Path to Science
It wasn't until his last year of high school in Elizabeth, N.J., that Robert W. Fernandez, who at age 4 emigrated from Peru with his family, learned that he was an undocumented alien. Colleges wouldn't admit him or demanded prohibitively high out-of-state tuition.
At that frustrating moment, he could not have imagined that he was on his way to a B.S. degree in biotechnology from York College in 2013, to a doctoral program at Yale University and in 2014 an extraordinarily competitive $90,000 award from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.
Fernandez did gain admittance to Union County College, a community college where he conducted independent study research on immigration, evolution and Down syndrome, was elected to the Phi Theta Kappa Honor society and graduated with a 3.9 GPA with an associate degree in business.
Then, "I was stuck until a friend, who also was undocumented, told me about the CUNY system" which welcomes students regardless of immigration status.
He took off a year to work and establish New York residency to qualify for in-state tuition. "The curriculum and research at York led me there," he says. After talking with biology professor Louis Levinger, who became a mentor, "I knew this was the school I wanted to go to."
During his time at York College, he went on to participate in a quantitative biology workshop at MIT. He conducted research on social behavior with Drosophila, the common fruit fly. In summer research at Princeton University, he delved into the mechanism stem cells use to differentiate for individual tasks.
At Yale, he has spent his first year rotating through biophysics, biochemistry and structural biology laboratories. He studied how neural circuits control egg-laying in a tiny round worm; tested novel drug compounds that might affect membrane leakage in Alzheimer's disease; examined how an extracellular matrix protein, laminin, figures in nerve stability in the cerebral cortex of mice; and worked to create a cell line that mimics aberrant gene fusion that can lead to cancer. He will decide which field to pursue for his Ph.D. this spring.
In 2013 he received permanent U.S. residency status. "My parents came here because of economic hardships in Peru," he says. "They knew it wasn't going to be easy, but they knew I'd have a better future. My mother worked 60 hours a week in a factory to support us, and I'm very grateful to her."
Fernandez's younger brother is now a sophomore at City College, planning to major in biology and intending to go to medical school. "My mom is so proud," Fernandez says.
The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans is a nationally competitive fellowship which in 2014 awarded grants for graduate studies to 30 immigrants or the children of immigrants. They were selected from among 1,200 applicants based on creativity, originality and initiative in light of the challenges and opportunities that were part of the applicant's immigration story.
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Aniqua Rahman
Stopping Cancer in its Tracks
If scientists could learn how to stop cancerous cells from spreading from a primary tumor site through the body (a process called metastasis), they might be closer to curtailing this disease. But how, exactly, do those cells spread?
Aniqua Rahman (City College, B.E.in biomedical engineering, 2013) hopes to find the answers with the support of a 2014 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Now a Cornell University biomedical engineering doctoral student, she intends to create microscale models using collagen, a common mammalian protein called the glue that holds the body together.
Using microfabrication technology, she intends to mimic the hollow, tube-like microtracks that the first metastatic cancer cells (leader cells) create when they use enzymes to burrow out of a primary tumor through collagen. Subsequent follower cells use these microtracks as their invasion highway. Rahman intends to investigate the migration mechanisms of follower cells, hoping to identify approaches that will inhibit metastasis by way of collagen microtracks.
She hypothesizes that previous attempts to thwart migrating cells have failed because microtracks had formed before researchers tried to block the burrowing enzymes, known as matrix metalloproteinases.
Her three-year agenda starts with developing a physical model using collagen and silicon molds, which will shape channels as small as 15 microns wide (about the size of white blood cells). Since cancer cells may adhere to microtracks as they migrate, her second step is to understand and characterize this process by introducing breast cancer cells. Her third step will investigate the mechanism by which cancer cells leave the tumor to see whether leader cells leave physical cues to guide follower cells.
Rahman, who was born in Bangladesh and moved to Queens during her senior year of high school, says she always knew she wanted to do something related to medicine and engineering. Working with direction from her mentor at City College, associate professor Steven B. Nicoll, she spent her junior and senior years studying how hydrogels (water-soluble polymer chains) might be used to deliver drugs and proteins. "I developed all of my basic skills there," she says, "like cell culturing technique, which my current research requires now."
The National Science foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This federal grant provides $132,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
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Jason Martinez
Keeping Fire from Traveling
There are few things scarier than a fire in a building — especially, Jason Martinez believes, when it happens in a building that isn't designed with sufficient knowledge of what happens when fire travels.
"Most buildings are designed based on stationary fires, which stay in one room or compartment," says Martinez (City College, B.S. in civil engineering, 2013), who received a 2014 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support his research. "We don't know enough about what happens in a building when fire travels horizontally or upward."
Working with 3-D computer models, he seeks a fuller understanding of how fire moves from one part of a room to another and from one part of a building to another. "I'd like to see if current designs and guidelines are adequate to resist traveling fires." Asked why this hasn't been researched thoroughly before, he gives a verbal shrug. "That's the big question I've been asking."
The end result of his research could be life-saving changes geared to high-rise buildings, which have long evacuation times. "If we don't understand how fire travels, we can't ensure that a building will stand up long enough to evacuate people and ensure the safety of firefighters."
Martinez found this topic last year after he began studying with assistant professor Ann Jeffers at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where he intends to earn dual master's degrees in civil and mechanical engineering on his way to a Ph.D.
At City College, he worked with assistant professor Huabei Liu, who focuses on geotechnical engineering, including static and dynamic soil-structure interactions, reinforced soil structures and hazard response, among related topics.
There, Martinez was involved with the characterization and testing of the interface of soil and geomembranes (synthetic barriers with very low permeability that line solid-waste landfills). He says the experience left him with a deep appreciation for research and a desire to continue his studies in civil engineering. He credits both professor Liu and City College for his early success in graduate school.
The National Science foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This federal grant provides $132,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
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Howie Chu
Powering Up for 21st Century
You probably don't realize it, but when you use a battery, it undergoes mechanical changes, such as expansion caused by the electrochemical processes inside. This doesn't make much of a difference in your flashlight, but if you're trying to maximize battery life in a hybrid or electric car, it can make all the difference in the world.
Howie Chu (City College, B.E. in chemical engineering, 2013) is using a 2014 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to study the interplay of electrochemical and mechanical phenomena in batteries.
Now a doctoral student in the Monroe Research Group at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Chu says, "Manufacturers give you a small window of battery usage in order to prevent mechanical failure. I believe that by implementing a better control system, we could get more life out of batteries." He believes that it may be possible to get as much as five times as much usable capacity out of an automotive lithium battery.
His research involves running batteries at various rates, charging and discharging them, and measuring the stress and strain when the battery is under an electrical load. Expansion and contraction of materials inside the battery can eventually degrade connections, leaving the battery useless, even if a charge remains.
Chu has been interested in batteries since he was a youngster, when he would see how long he could play video games before he lost battery power.
At City College, a professor, Dan Steingart, who is now at Princeton, asked him to help study alkaline batteries with "compliant architectures," like flexible or stretchy batteries, rather than the traditional hard cell. "These could be useful for wearable technology and sensors," he says. (Another 2014 NSF winner, Alla Zamarayeva, worked in this lab on sprayable batteries.)
Chu rounded out his undergraduate education with a summer research experience for undergraduates, funded by the National Science Foundation, at Penn State University and an internship at the Palo Alto Research Center Inc. (formerly Xerox Parc). Both projects also involved batteries.
The National Science foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This federal grant provides $132,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
View All Outstanding Students »
Ember Kane-Lee
Wrestling with Gender Inequality
From grades 8 through 12, Ember Kane-Lee wrestled as the first and, so far, only girl ever on the New Paltz High School team in upstate New York, earning a second-place statewide ranking for girls in her weight class.
By 2013, when she graduated from Brooklyn College with a B.A. in sociology, she held a black belt in Okinawan Isshin Ryu karate and had won a competitive $5,000 Rosen Fellowship, which supports out-of-classroom personal-development experiences for Brooklyn undergraduates. She used the grant to travel to Colorado to see the U.S. women's wrestling team train for the 2012 Summer Olympics and to Michigan to see a college women's wrestling tournament.
At each event, she interviewed athletes about their experiences wrestling alongside, training with and competing against men before they could join all-female teams. She presented the resulting research paper at several conferences, including the Eastern Sociological Society conference in Boston and The City University of New York Pipeline Conference at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan.
Now a sociology doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (and a novice boxer), she will use her 2014 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to deepen the work she started in Brooklyn. "I'd like to continue scrutinizing gender inequality as more women are entering into aggressive male-dominated sports," she says.
Kane-Lee intends to move into ethnography as she probes the gender dynamics surrounding girls joining high school wrestling teams; girls make up only 2 percent of high school wrestlers nationwide. She will look at team dynamics to see how boys' viewpoints and sense of masculinity change as a result of training alongside girls. She also will analyze the types of circumstances in which boys change their perceptions about female athletes as a result of having female teammates.
Wrestling, she says, teaches women to be assertive and to see the value of determination and not giving up. "But there can be negatives when women join male teams, ranging from unspoken bias to verbal abuse, sexual harassment and even rape." Sometimes it's from teammates, her research found, "but more often it's from opponents who don't want to face these women in tournaments."
To do well, wrestlers, male or female, have "to make sacrifices in their social lives. Wrestlers are the first ones in the gym in the morning and often the last ones out at night. They spend hours a day training, lifting, competing against other people on the team, practicing." During a match — three intense two-minute periods — "every second you're thinking what will work best, not only acting from muscle memory. It's like a chess game."
The National Science foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This federal grant provides $132,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
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Jin-Xiang Yu
Elite Opera Program Hers for a Song
Had it not been for a Queens College volleyball coach, Jin-Xiang Yu might not have trained as a soprano, won a 2014 Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Arts Award — the first by a CUNY student — and secured admission to Yale School of Music's elite opera performance program.
"I was playing in a volleyball tournament when a coach approached me and said, 'If you want to go to college, come to Queens College,'" says Yu. (Her first name is pronounced gin-shahn, but her friends call her JX.)
Yu was then a freshman at Mercy College, studying communication disorders to retain her student visa. Having grown up in Japan with parents of Chinese and Russian background (her father plays the traditional erhu, a two-stringed violin, her mother jazz piano), she had previously earned a two-year certificate in musical theater at Manhattan's American Musical and Dramatic Academy and spent a year singing and dancing in regional musical productions.
"I went back to school to hone my craft. I had never trained as a singer and felt uncomfortable singing in front of people. And I hated classical music, which I thought extremely pretentious," she says. But at her first music class at Queens College, "I absolutely fell in love."
She was "fortunate to have extremely supportive faculty members and mentors who guided me." Lecturer Roy Nitzberg taught her first music history class, where her interest in classical music strengthened, and encouraged her to re-audition for the bachelor of music program in voice performance. He "kept pushing me. Knowing someone I respected saw potential in me made me work a lot harder."
She also earned a B.A. in linguistics. She had grown up speaking Japanese and Chinese, attending English-speaking international pre-K-12 schools and studying Spanish from an early age. "Being around so many languages and cultures sparked my interest in languages. In opera I'll sing French, Italian, German, Czech, Russian, even Polish. I want to promote obscure pieces or those written by good composers who were overshadowed by great composers."
While at Queens, she captured a $7,000-a-year grant for people of Asian ancestry from the William Orr Dingwald Foundation. She also won a fellowship to study and sing art songs (poetry set to music) at the 2014 Toronto Summer Music Festival.
She applied for the Cooke Award at the suggestion of the college's national fellowships adviser, Moira Egan. The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation confers up to 20 awards annually to people who plan on careers as practicing artists; the award is worth up to $50,000 a year for three years of graduate study. The selection panel considers "artistic or creative merit, academic achievement, financial need and resilience."
Meanwhile, Yu had applied to several graduate programs including Yale, which accepts eight singers a year on full scholarship. She says she planned on auditioning, but "had no idea there was going to be an interview, so I prepared nothing."
When the opera department's artistic director asked why she had gone to Queens College rather than a conservatory, "I said it's really important for artists to have a general education, so you have knowledge of the world that can feed your expression ... I'm 100 percent certain I was not the best technical singer at the audition because I was listening to everybody else, and I left thinking that I was definitely not getting in. Though my technique needed a lot of work, my desperation to express something meaningful and special must have resonated with the panel."
As for volleyball, she played for a semester until sidelined by injury. "I would not have been able to do so much with music if I'd stayed with the team. Professor Nitzberg helped me decide to focus and not spread myself too thin." Of course, she admits, pursuing a double major would spread a lot of people thin, "but linguistics fed into the diction and language courses that are required for singers. And I told myself that if I didn't get into an opera program, I'd do a Ph.D. in linguistics, focusing my research on the marriage between language and music."
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Iskander Kapkayev
Preparing Kids for Calc
"I had a pretty rough history with math in elementary school," recalls Iskander Kapkayev. "A lot of the questions were too hard, but there was something about math that attracted me and I kept coming back to them. I got a lot of help from my mom, who I thank to this day."
Kapkayev (Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College, 2014) graduated with a bachelor's in mathematics and won a rare Math for America Fellowship, which prepares talented graduates to teach math in New York City's public secondary schools. This highly competitive award pays for a master's in secondary math education at City College. It also provides a $100,000 stipend over five years in addition to the regular teacher's salary to encourage recipients to stay in teaching during the demanding initial years of teaching, when attrition is highest.
Born in Uzbekistan, he immigrated to the United States with his family when he was 4. Two older brothers graduated from Brooklyn College as business majors; his younger sister follows him at Macaulay-Brooklyn this fall.
He says he'll remember his experience as an initially reluctant, but then eager, math student when he teaches. "By the time I got to high school, I realized that math came much easier to me than to most people. I know how much some hate it and, because of that, a lot of teachers avoid critical things. In college precalc and calc, professors say students can't do problem-solving. I won't be a tough teacher, but I want to build their mathematical foundation."
The small High School of Economics offered only the first of the Advanced Placement (college-level) calculus courses, so Kapkayev took the second course as an independent study.
He says he was "shocked" that Macaulay accepted him. "I didn't have the greatest grades in high school. I was a pretty slacking type of student. Macaulay picked me up for math, and I'm totally grateful."
In college math, "You don't see most of the things you learn in high school, like applications focused on the real world. If you see numbers, you're lucky, because courses use the alphabet. I'm a big fan of number theory and theoretical mathematics, but," he adds with a laugh, "I don't want to go into them too deeply because I might lose my sanity."
Kapkayev is particularly indebted to mathematics professor Kishore Marathe, whose specialties are differential geometry and theoretical physics, with special interest in gauge field theories and gravity. "But in the math department he was also a tremendous force in real and complex analysis. Under him I learned an impressive amount of both. These courses are difficult to understand, since they are not that intuitive.
He used Macaulay's Opportunity Fund to pay a stipend during his two-year internship at the Hope Program, a nonprofit in Brooklyn that combines social, vocational and educational services. "It gives a second opportunity to dropouts, people who went to prisons, people who had a hard life." He taught clients to use software like Word and Excel and helped prepare them to take the GED examination for a high school equivalency diploma. "They needed a lot of math help."
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Matthew De Andrade
Chasing Math's Mysteries
It was in the seventh grade when Matthew De Andrade's teacher made the astounding statement that there was no way of knowing every prime number. "And I remember saying, 'No way. I don't believe that.' That's how I got into math. The mysteries are still there."
At Queens College he began exploring abstract realms of mathematics, including cardinal numbers, which count sets of objects, and was even more intrigued. "Certain cardinal numbers are infinite. From a certain, technical, perspective, there actually are different kinds of infinity, with some bigger than others."
De Andrade, who graduates in 2014, intends to share his enthusiasm for the mysteries of mathematics with New York City's public high school students - a career he will prepare for with the help of a Math for America Fellowship.
This highly competitive award pays for a three-semester master's in secondary mathematics education at City College. It also provides a $100,000 stipend spread over five years, including the first four years of teaching, in addition to the regular teacher's salary. This long-term payout aims to retain new teachers during the stressful first years in the classroom, when attrition is highest.
De Andrade has tutored math and English since high school at The Child Center of New York's location in Woodside, working with students aged 6 to 17. "That's when I gained an appreciation for what goes into teaching," he says. He also tutors at the Queens College Seek Learning Center and for private clients.
"Being a teacher is a great career path," he says. "I know what it's like to help someone, and it's a good and happy experience. I also want to encourage studying math. It's such a beautiful and misrepresented subject.
"Mathematician Edward Frenkel [of the University of California-Berkeley] makes this analogy: A lot of the time when people study math at a young age, it's as if you were in an art class and learned how to paint a fence, and the next time the teacher has you paint a fence with a rose, and the next time a fence with a person. And you never ask the teacher, 'When are we going to learn to paint a face?' There's no hint to the student that if you go far enough with math, you can create your own. I want students to know that math will stretch their imagination and that there is so much more to learn than you do at the outset."
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Zarin Tasnim
Teaching English in Korea
As an immigrant from Bangladesh, 2014 Fulbright winner Zarin Tasnim faced resistance at home when she said she wanted to become a lawyer and work with survivors of domestic violence and others who have been disenfranchised.
"Because my cultural background has a very conservative view of women and their role in society, I had to work hard to convince my parents and others around me that I am capable of taking on such challenges and that it's my right to do so," says Tasnim (Macaulay Honors College at Lehman College, B.A. in political science and history, 2014).
She's not afraid of challenges. She's off to South Korea to teach conversational English to elementary or secondary school students through a yearlong 2014 Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship. This is her second trip to Korea; in Fall 2012 she took advantage of Lehman's exchange program with Sungshin Women's University in Seoul to study Korean language and culture for the semester. She previously had spent a year studying Korean at Queens College.
She previously traveled to Florence, Italy, to study Renaissance History through the College of Staten Island's Study Abroad Program. She has interned at the New York State Attorney General's Office and at the New York Country District Attorney's Office. She intends to apply to law school after her return from Korea.
Tasnim received a number of academic awards, including the Horace W. Goldsmith Scholarship, Jewish Foundation for Education of Women Scholarship, Freeman Asia Scholarship and a St. George's Society Scholarship.
"She is definitely one of our stars," says professor Gary Schwartz, a Greek and Latin scholar who directs the Macaulay Honors College at Lehman and the Lehman Scholars Program. "Zarin is an exceptional combination of intellect, tact, sensitivity, insight and leadership."
"The reason I applied for the Fulbright, and all the other scholarships and programs for that matter, was because of Dr. Schwartz and my other professors — [cultural anthropologist] Richard Blot and [political scientist] Ira Bloom — who have been so encouraging and always pushing me," Tasnim says. "It's really inspiring to have people who believe in you so much."
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Daniel Friedman
Researching Linguistic Connections in Austria
Daniel Friedman (Brooklyn College, MFA in Creative Writing 2014) is a mathematician, a poet, philosopher and scholar of the German language. For Friedman, a Fulbright Award will allow him to finally connect those diverse academic and intellectual interests.
Friedman believes the key to cultural exchange and mutual understanding between two cultures lies in the study of their languages. With his Fulbright in Vienna, Friedman plans to collaborate and write a poetry manuscript focused on the philosophical and poetic potentials in German and English.
"When one speaks of promoting cultural exchange and mutual understanding, a critical investigation of language ... is often taken for granted," Friedman wrote in his Fulbright grant proposal. "For my proposal, language itself is the object of research, particularly specific linguistic elements within German and their relationship to those in English."
Friedman said Austrian thinkers and the German language have long played an important role in his academic and creative life. As an undergraduate at the University of Oregon, Friedman studied both philosophy and math, immersing himself in the ideas of Austrian mathematician Kurt Friedrich Gödel and Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
After obtaining his undergraduate degree, he devoted himself to poetry and was accepted into the Brooklyn College MFA in creative writing program.
While in New York, Friedman worked directly with Austrian artist Moussa Kone. They soon began discussing the potential for collaboration by pairing Kone's visual art with Friedman's poetry.
"These discussions along with my continued academic studies are at the core of this present Fulbright proposal," Friedman wrote in his Fulbright personal statement. "I will pursue it through artistic collaboration, academic involvement and linguistic research."
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Alyssa Marchetti
Learning American
Born in the People's Republic of China, raised from age 11 in the United States, Alyssa Marchetti (Hunter College, M.S. Ed., 2014) has explored the boundaries of race, ethnicity and identity through her fraught experience of an English language learner. Now in Taiwan on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship, she brings a profound understanding of the difficulties that students can face when learning the language that gave her so much trouble.
She came to the United States in 2001, not knowing any English. Taunted by classmates and embarrassed at her initial difficulty in mastering this difficult language, she says she became "selectively mute."
"I would have stayed silent if not for the patient support of my new stepfather, who designed the ultimate curriculum in Americanism: a diet of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, daily readings from the Macmillan/McGraw-Hill U.S. history textbook, and nightly viewings of 'Seinfeld' and 'The Simpsons,'" she wrote in her Fulbright application. "Pretty soon I was reading on grade level and my speech became peppered with pop culture references."
Those experiences "had tremendous impact on the trajectory of my career and identity." But as she assimilated, the local Asian-American community saw her as "too 'Westernized,' too 'white.' I had arrived at a critical juncture in the first generation immigrant experience: hold on to your cultural roots or become Americanized?"
The answer, she found, lay not in choosing between those alternatives, but in blending her experiences and contributing to society. She tutored in college, such as in writing seminars for international students. After college, she signed on for a two-year stint with Teach for America and headed to Hunter for her master's degree, specializing in adolescent special education.
"Although there are aspects of American society I do not like, such as the educational inequity in this country, teaching allows me to channel my frustration into something productive — a commitment to be part of the solution. I believe education is a tool of empowerment and a way to affect change."
She emailed that she applied for the Fulbright in Taiwan because the island republic — so close physically to mainland China, but so far away politically — had "always been a sort of forbidden place for me. I was exposed to Taiwanese culture in the form of imported food and television. I was interested in how I would be perceived in Taiwan. I now feel really connected to my year in Taiwan and feel it is the best possible country I could have picked for myself."
When she returns, she intends to teach English-language learners, especially students with gaps in their formal education, and eventually to pursue a Ph.D. in education.
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Karla Padawer Solomon
Teaching English, Loving Spanish
In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sent Columbus on his westward voyage, reunited Spain under Christian rule by vanquishing Muslim forces and ordered Spain's 200,000 Jews to convert to Catholicism or leave the country. Fearing the Inquisition, which used torture and burning at the stake to stamp out heresy and ensure the orthodoxy of converts, many conversos submerged their heritage so deeply that their descendants didn't know about it.
Flash forward to 2013, when Karla Padawer Solomon was in Madrid, studying Spanish at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and sharing Sabbath meals with Spaniards who in recent decades had discovered their pre-Inquisition roots and converted back to Judaism.
"We grew very close as we learned about each other's backgrounds," says Solomon (Macaulay Honors College at Queens College, B.A. in psychology, minors in Spanish and linguistics, 2014), who was raised in a New York Orthodox Jewish community. She made other friends when she "had the guts to take on native Spanish speakers in a local poetry contest."
Flash forward once more to Fall 2014, when she is back in Spain on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship. Anticipating this work, she said she intended to use American literature, music and dance as the basis of discussions in which students could develop their oral and written English skills. Her goal is to "promote cross-cultural dialogue, as any work of art is an invitation to learn more about the creator and culture from which it emanates." She also intends to explore Spanish-Jewish history.
Her fascination with Spanish language dates to childhood, when her mother would put her to sleep recounting her memories of having hitchhiked across Spain in the 1970s. By kindergarten, Solomon counted to 100 in Spanish. "This beautiful language helped me cultivate my individual identity in a homogenous environment," she says. "Reading and writing also allowed me transport myself to faraway places."
In 11th grade, Solomon explored her Jewish heritage in a science program in Israel, which she followed with a gap year of study after high school. "My year in Israel was the first time that I voluntarily studied Jewish texts and Hebrew language without being required to do so by my parents or teachers," she says.
Her love of language is pointing her toward an eventual master's degree in applied linguistics. She began preparing for a career teaching long before starting her Fulbright. While in high school, she volunteered at a public school for physically and mentally challenged students aged 5 to 21; she says she learned to take instructional cues from the students and to not immediately correct their mistakes.
At Queens College, where she also earned 30 credits in the creative and performing arts, she worked in the Writing Center for more than two years, particularly with non-native English speakers. "Together, we examined their individual ideas, beliefs and relationships through the writing process," she says.
Reached at the Fulbright orientation conference in September before leaving for Spain, Solomon said that it appeared that she would be coaching 14- to 16-year-olds in their English skills as they write position papers, debate and learn about global issues for Global Classrooms Conferences, which resemble the Model U.N. in U.S. high schools. "I took a wonderful public speaking class with Lisa Bernard at Queens College, and I'm hoping to utilize the skills I learned there to coach these students as best I can."
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John Horgan
Forging Cultural Connections
John Brendan Horgan (Brooklyn College, M.A. in Education, 2014) describes his childhood in Ohio as being raised with an open mind in a sheltered bubble.
That bubble burst in 2009 when he interned with the Cook County Public Defender's Office in Chicago.
"I saw grown men and women broken by lifetimes of regret and hopelessness," Horgan wrote in his Fulbright personal statement. "I saw teenage kids bruised and Taser-burned from scuffles with police. I saw row upon row of lifeless bodies housed in a warehouse morgue, all victims of a secluded but ferocious culture of street violence."
The experience led to his desire to become a teacher, and in the spring of 2012 he headed to Beijing to teach English at the Vitaly Springs Experimental Kindergarten. Soon after, he came to Brooklyn College where he earned his master's degree in education while teaching inner-city students with special needs at the New York Harbor School on Governors Island.
As a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Malaysia, Horgan says he wants to strengthen cultural connections and encourage educational enrichment.
"Through the use of different mediums, whether film screenings or social media projects, I plan to help students realize the application and power of their English language skills," Horgan wrote in his Fulbright grant proposal. "I would also like to manipulate technology with programs such as Google Docs and Skype to arrange for direct interaction between Malaysian students and native English speakers in the United States."
Horgan also hopes to create a learn-to-swim program in Malaysia, and act as the curator of a community space that could serve for further dialogue through art, ideas, and other forms of public interaction.
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James Blair
Exploring the Falklands' Future
On the windswept Falkland Islands, a British-controlled archipelago off the southernmost tip of Argentina, some 3,000 residents face political and cultural upheaval as they shift the economy from fishing and sheep (488,395 at last count) to offshore oil.
In 1982, Argentina invaded what it calls Las Malvinas and, despite defeat by Britain in a nasty 10-week war, it continues to assert sovereignty at the United Nations. This prompted a 2013 self-determination referendum, in which all but three of the Falkland Islanders who voted opted to remain a British overseas territory.
CUNY anthropology doctoral candidate James J.A. Blair is using his 2014 Fulbright All-Disciplines Postgraduate Award and National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant to research how Falkland Islanders chart their future through new forms of governance over resources, particularly energy.
"I'll observe ways in which Falkland Islanders are planning for oil development," says Blair. His dissertation, which also is funded by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, will consider decision-making about infrastructure, including "debates about where the port and roads should be, as well as how to make the most of this potential oil revenue." Other critical issues range from encouraging people to stay in agriculture to protecting penguins and safeguarding the environment from oil development.
There are also intriguing ethnographic questions. "I'm interested in analyzing this group's claim that they're a people. They're mostly descendants of settlers from Britain, but they're effectively reinventing themselves as natives through new forms of governance and this claim of self-determination, which since the era of decolonization is a right claimed primarily by indigenous populations," Blair says.
Blair first became interested in the Falklands as an undergraduate at Boston College, when he was in Argentina researching textile factories. While completing coursework at the CUNY Graduate Center, he visited the Falklands on the 30th anniversary of the war in order to develop his dissertation proposal through a grant program of the Social Science Research Council. In talking with Argentine scholars, he realized that "no one had done an anthropological study in the Falklands."
With a CUNY Fred A. Mayer Travel Award, he then returned to the islands during the 2013 referendum on self-determination and wrote a series of articles on the Falklands for The Economist. To supplement his ethnographic fieldwork, his project includes archival research in Argentina and in the United Kingdom.
An undergraduate double major in history and philosophy, with a minor in Latin American studies, Blair worked for the Sierra Club in California for several years after earning his bachelor's degree.
He says he chose CUNY for his Ph.D. because of the anthropology faculty. "It's theoretically rigorous and innovative, not just studying traditional field sites, but pushing anthropology into new interdisciplinary investigations," he says. He particularly appreciates his adviser, Marc Edelman at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, an expert in peasants and social movements in Latin America and beyond. "His work is not closely related to my project, but through conversations with him and other faculty, I've developed an exciting project."
As a graduate student, Blair taught undergraduate courses at Brooklyn College for several years, including cultural and linguistic anthropology, cultures and transformation, and anthropological perspectives on sex ("It's not my field, but I inherited a good syllabus and successfully taught it five times"). "On some days I'd go from teaching to take my own classes and feel pride, for CUNY is a public institution with such a range of students. Some are brilliant, writing papers I'd be proud to publish; others struggle because they are first-generation immigrants. It's a humbling and special experience to teach at Brooklyn."
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James Williams
Making City Government Work
Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, a fast-growing area with more than 21 million people, James Oladipupo Williams was used to a fast-paced urban crush. What threw him after he arrived in New York 2011 was the very notion of a city government that was responsible for the nuts and bolts of urban life.
"Nigeria's federal government presides over the largest economy in Africa, with a GDP
growing at about 7 percent," says Williams (John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
B.S., Public Administration, '15). "Most projects happen at the state level.
Localities are reduced to performing a function of political mobilization, not local
As a 2015 New York City Urban Fellow, he'll get an insider's view of how a U.S. city government works. When he returns home, probably after earning a master's in public policy or public administration, he says, "I want to create a more representative government for the Nigerian people and enhance their development."
The nationally competitive Urban Fellowship, a $30,000 nine-month program, introduces participants to local government and public service. Fellows work in a New York City agency, take seminars in urban issues and travel to Albany and Washington, D.C., to discuss government structure and finance with public officials.
Through CUNY's Edward T. Rogowsky Internship Program in Government and Public Affairs, Williams already has a sense of Congress. He interned with Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn-Queens) in summer 2014. He helped with congressional office work, including reviewing legislation, answering constituent mail and researching policy issues.
An aunt in New York suggested that he look into John Jay for his college education. "The strength of the college, its commitment to public service and the coincidence that the student government president at that time also was Nigerian connected me to the institution."
He helped organize the International Students Association "to bridge the gap from whatever part of the world you're coming from and John Jay. We deal with issues ranging from social integration to professional dynamics in the U.S., because the culture here is so different. For example, I didn't know what an internship was until I got here."
Williams speaks with hope about oil-rich Nigeria, which is beset with chronic developmental challenges, Boko Haram terrorism and complex regional allegiances. Since gaining independence in 1960, it has seen repeated military coups, but on May 29, 2015, Nigeria was slated to see its fourth consecutive democratic transfer of presidential power.
"Increased engagement in public media and on the street is good news," he says. "We're not expecting magic, but there is hope that this new government can really move the country forward. At this time my deepest hope is that Nigerians do not go back to sleep. We must change the discussion from politics to policy and engage with leaders at all levels."
With his Urban Fellowship, Williams intends to add a new dimension. "I want to see how New York City government serves New Yorkers, and I want to take back and put into practice what I learn."
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María Sánchez Díez
Setting the News on Fire
The very name "The Fuego" implies what the online news service aims to do: mix English and Spanish to fire up young Hispanic-Americans.
"English and Spanish cohabit in conversation among Latinos, and news products don't necessarily have to be in one language or the other," says María Sánchez Díez, a Spaniard who won a 2015 Foreign Press Association grant to further the project. She has been developing The Fuego at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, from which she expects to graduate with an M.A. in Entrepreneurial Journalism in December 2015.
"Latinos are one in five young Americans, but only 1 percent of news is about them,"
she says. "I believe this underserved community deserves the same access to the news
that everyone else has been having for years."
Her service, now in the beta stage at www.thefuego.net , aggregates news from around the Web in both languages and feature original reporting. "Latinos are very diverse and, as we get more people involved, we'll provide news on their home countries in a way they can relate to."
The Fuego will target Latinos who were born in the United States. "They have a dual identity. Many are bilingual. Major newspapers and TV networks like Univision and Telemundo serve their parents in Spanish, but there's a gap for young Latinos who are in-between identity."
Sánchez Díez attends the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism as a Fulbright Foreign Student Fellow. This U.S.-funded program enables foreign graduate students, young professionals and artists to study and conduct research in the United States. She notes that competition for Foreign Fulbrights has been especially fierce in economically distressed Spain, where, Eurostat reports, 54 percent of young people were unemployed as of April 1, 2014.
She came with a deep background in print and online journalism.
Sánchez Díez launched and was digital editor-in-chief of Condé Nast Traveler Spain magazine (Traveler.es). In the only pan-European competition for Internet content, the site won two silver Lovie Awards (Best European Travel Site and Best Editorial Work) and a special mention in the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences' Webby Awards competition (Best Design).
She reported for Soitu.es, a now-defunct digital media hub that won the Online News Association excellence award for a non-English site in 2008 and 2009.
She freelanced for El País, Spain's largest-circulation daily newspaper, co-writing the music and travel blog "Motel Americana." She managed the online short film festival Notodofilmfest and coordinated social media strategy for the PhotoEspaña photography festival. In her predigital days, she reported for Mexico's El Mundo de Tehuacán.
Sánchez Díez says she chose to attend the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism because it offers the first master's in entrepreneurial journalism. "In 10 years, the world of journalism as we used to know it will be gone. CUNY is focused on new skills and, it works like a startup. The professors are amazing and very helpful, especially to foreign students who come not knowing about the city, the culture and the country."
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Johnathan Culpepper
Trapping Greenhouse Gasses
Scientists agree that greenhouse gases are changing Earth's climate. Carbon dioxide is expelled when creatures breathe, vegetation rots and Arctic soils defrost. Nitrogen, more than three-quarters of our air, pollutes when oxidized by combustion and other processes.
But what if carbon and nitrogen could be pulled out of the atmosphere and locked up as minerals? Johnathan Culpepper (Medgar Evers College, A.A., Mass Communications,'06; B.S., Environmental Science '09) will explore that idea with a 2015 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Working with civil and environmental engineering professor Michelle Scherer at the University of Iowa College of Engineering, Culpepper intends to research iron's potential to sequester carbon and nitrogen. Iron is the fourth most abundant element on Earth, after oxygen, silicon and aluminum. It easily reacts with other elements, forming stable compounds both on land and in the oceans.
"I hypothesize that there is a unique iron pathway that influences and is interdependent on the better understood carbon and nitrogen cycles," Culpepper says. ("Cycles" refers to the natural exchange of elements among living things, soils, rocks, oceans and atmosphere.) "There is limited understanding of how iron minerals interact with carbon and nitrogen," he explains. He questions why the surfaces of iron oxide minerals can lock up organic carbon; how iron oxide interactions preserve carbon in water and soil; and how carbon and nitrogen compounds can rapidly attach to iron surfaces.
Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Culpepper worked his way through Medgar Evers as an international student by selling his art, from paintings to logo designs. As an undergraduate, he mentored high school chemistry and physics students in the Collegiate Science and Technology Entry program (CSTEP), guiding teams to first- and second-prize victories in statewide competitions. He worked as a chemistry lab technician and interned in a NASA-funded atmospheric research project; his job was to prepare all apparatus and chemicals used to detect ozone using helium-filled balloons.
After earning his bachelor's, Culpepper "wanted to give back" to the Medgar Evers community. For three years he taught English writing, mathematics and general science to adults in POISED for Success, which is funded by CUNY's Research Foundation. He also taught 100- to 200-level undergraduate courses in English composition and writing, algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus, art history, physics and general and organic chemistry.
Now married, the father of two daughters and becoming a U.S. citizen, Culpepper says he "wants to become a professor of environmental engineering in a research-intensive institution." His target is "elemental cycles and interactions within our soil, water and atmospheric systems."
The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious award for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The federal grant provides $138,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
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Laura Rodríguez
Championing Justice for Immigrants
Growing up with a Colombian mother in Jackson Heights, a Queens neighborhood that's one of the most diverse in the nation, Laura Sofia Rodríguez says she "always felt part of a community of immigrants, even though I was born here."
Nearing her 2015 graduation from Emory University School of Law, Rodríguez (City College, B.A. in Spanish, concentration in Latin American Literature and History, '11) says she heard about the Immigrant Justice Corps and "knew it would be my dream job."
She is one of two CUNY alumnae and new law school graduates to win a 2015 Justice Fellowship from the Immigrant Justice Corps, joining Nabila Taj (CUNY School of Law, '15). Three CUNY baccalaureate graduates won Community Fellowships to conduct outreach and legal intake for immigrant-law organizations.
Robert A. Katzmann, the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, founded the Corps in 2014 because too few attorneys were providing affordable representation to immigrants. His initiative grew out of a study that found immigrants with a lawyer were almost six times more likely to win their cases than those without, and that incompetent legal providers for immigrants often swindled their clients and botched their cases. The corps this year awarded 35 fellowships.
Rodríguez is assigned to Immigration Equality in Lower Manhattan, the only national organization that primarily represents LGBT/HIV-positive clients on immigration matters. "Immigration Equality literally saves the lives of people who are persecuted in their home countries based on their status as LGBT/H," she says. It also works on policy and legislative reform.
Her two-year fellowship can be renewed for a third year. "I'll go to immigration court on matters including asylum and removal proceedings and do appellate work in federal court, which is really exciting." The agency primarily handles clients from Jamaica, Russia and Mexico.
An undergraduate history class on the fall of communism put Rodríguez on the path to a legal career. "The professor made us think critically and be analytical about what we were reading and not take what's written at face value. I enjoyed that intellectual challenge." Realizing that the law required the same sort of rigorous thinking, she interned at a local immigration law firm as an undergraduate "to see beyond the "Law and Order: SVU" shows. When I saw what the practice of law is really like, I knew that's what I wanted."
At Emory, Rodríguez interned at the Executive Office for Immigration Review in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico and the Latin American Association in Atlanta. "Every time I talk with clients, no matter what their background, mostly indigent, I hear my mom, who was a housekeeper in Manhattan for very wealthy people and struggled hard to give me a great future," she says. "When I hear clients going through similar issues, I'm motivated to do my best. I feel personally invested in what I do and feel really lucky to have found an area of law I can be truly passionate about."
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Keelie Sheridan
Clytemnestra in Ireland
What if the Oresteia — the ancient Greek plays about the triumph of jury-based justice over murder and revenge — took place in Ireland?
Keelie Sheridan (Brooklyn College, MFA, Acting '13) intends to reimagine that prize-winning trilogy (Dionysia Festival, 458 B.C.) during her George J. Mitchell Scholarship to The Lir, Ireland's National Academy of Dramatic Art, and Trinity College, Dublin, where she will work on a second MFA — this time in directing — in 2016-17.
The highly competitive scholarship, sponsored by the U.S.-Ireland Alliance, covers postgraduate study in Ireland or Northern Ireland. The 12 Mitchell winners for 2016, selected from 270 applicants, were announced in November 2014.
Sheridan has helped support her family for half her life. Since age 14, she has worked at farm stands, babysitting and McDonalds and, in Brooklyn, as a commercial photographer, teacher and adaptive arts specialist for school-age and adult clients with developmental disabilities. She was chosen Miss Brooklyn in 2009 and Miss NYC in 2010 and competed both years for Miss New York State in the Miss America competition. She also has landed a fairly steady stream of acting work.
Born in Sioux City, Iowa, Sheridan fell in love with Irish step dancing at age 7. By 10, she was touring Ireland, Canada and the United States as a principal dancer with the Wild Irish Acres School of Irish Dance. In January 2014, she backpacked "the whole coast" of Ireland. Dublin, she says, with "such a historic tradition of storytelling … is open to new theater," particularly its vibrant indie theater community.
Her family lived in about 20 houses before she was 18, when she moved to Brooklyn after some years in the Adirondacks. Her college career also was peripatetic, including SUNY Fulton-Montgomery Community College, Borough of Manhattan Community College and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts; six years after earning her high school diploma, she got her B.A. in acting from Empire State College in 2010.
But for her master's, "It came down to Brooklyn or Rutgers, and Brooklyn felt like home," she says. "It was clear how much individual attention students received and how rigorous the program was. They crammed three years of work into two. My thesis was about the process of preparing for an acting role at the Whitman Theater. I played Loretta in 'Featuring Loretta,' a one-act play by George F. Walker. It's a great character, a woman who finds herself in a tough situation."
So why is Sheridan focusing on the Oresteia? She's long been fascinated with Clytemnestra. She kills her husband, King Agamemnon, who had had sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, to get favorable winds to sail off to wage the Trojan War and rescue the kidnapped Helen (of Troy), who was his brother's wife and Clytemnestra's half sister. Later, Clytemnestra's son, Orestes, kills her to avenge his father.
Sheridan says Clytemnestra "is much maligned and portrayed as a broadly painted villain, but the history is that she had a life and family in her native land before Agamemnon, the conqueror, killed her family. Clytemnestra had her own language and customs, which were inaccessible to her husband who speaks the language of the conqueror. This is similar to the history of the Irish. I'm interested in language and identity, and the Irish language is in perilous condition."
She also seeks "intersections between art forms, such as integrating photography into live performance and site-specific works. I like shaking up the audience-performer relationships and giving a performance without a wall between the stage and the audience."
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Gregory Pardlo
Poetry From Life
For Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo, the complex issues of identity form the crux of his work. In his brilliant collection, "Digest," he writes about sometimes struggling through his varied roles in life as a new father, Brooklyn resident and black man in America.
However, his poetic journey begins with a voice from the past, the voices of his ancestors in a poem entitled "Written by Himself."
I was born in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skillet
whispering my name. I was born to rainwater and lye;
I was born across the river where I
was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth,
broadsides sewn in my shoes.
"One of my concerns, early on in the inception of this book, was that this material is me. So that the discourses that make up our literary traditions become my identity," Pardlo said.
"And this poem takes material collaged from abolitionist literature, from slave narratives, from canonical Afro-American literature. They're images that scholars or even casual readers of slave narratives will recognize," he said. "I don't have any experience with harrow tooths or rainwater and lye. So, a lot of these images are things that are very foreign to me. But nonetheless, I was interested in working with them as material."
Pardlo, a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center and former assistant professor at Medgar Evers College, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Judges cited his "clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private."
In "Digest," Pardlo tackles an astounding array of subjects from race to philosophy to family relationships. He also includes poetic references to literary greats like Ralph Ellison, Chinua Achebe and Miguel de Cervantes.
"I wanted to look for ways to integrate my scholarly interests and my creative interests," he said. "So, a lot of the poems in the book are in conversation with other books. The buzzword is intertextuality. That was one of the projects that serves as the foundation for most of the poems."
Pardlo also writes extensively about Brooklyn and explores how gentrification has transformed the fabric of his neighborhood. However, Pardlo says his poems describe people and places in Brooklyn that have largely been ignored by contemporary writers.
"We all know Brooklyn has changed dramatically…and I was really interested in capturing that transition," he said. "And it seemed to me that all the clichés about Brooklyn that are literary clichés were usually referencing coffee shops in Boerum Hill or Cobble Hill and Park Slope, and that wasn't the Brooklyn that I was experiencing on a day-to-day basis. That wasn't the Brooklyn where the most meaningful intersections and interactions between communities and across communities was happening. And I wanted to give space to that. I wanted to make that my territory."
Currently, Pardlo is working on his dissertation, which focuses on the visual agency of African American poets and writers in the early twentieth century.
"That is, what did black authors, in their texts, give themselves permission to report seeing, having seen or witnessed," Pardlo explained. "How are these forms of sight, insight and witness conveyed in the work?"
When asked what advice he would offer to young writers and aspiring poets, Pardlo said, "Make the work, itself, the thing you enjoy. Make that the reward."
"What got me through a lot of the fallow times was just the sheer joy of writing a poem and pursuing it against my own sort of resistances, my own fears and inhibitions, and the sense of growth that comes out of every poem that feels like I've done the work necessary that this poem demands," Pardlo said.
"And that's a joyful moment for me, and that's the thing that I look for each time."
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Jeffrey Peer
The Mexico Chonicles
On Oct. 2, 1968, police and military troops in Mexico City shot into a crowd of unarmed students who had jammed Tlatelolco Plaza to protest an earlier attack at a national preparatory school. At least 40 students died, perhaps many more. Thousands were beaten and jailed. Countless students disappeared.
"It was a period of intense transformation in the history of the city," says Jeffrey Peer, a third-year doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center. With a 2015 Fulbright grant, he intends to study how that tumultuous era, as well as the decades that followed Mexico's revolution, which started in 1910, were narrated in newspaper essays known as the crónica urbana, or urban chronicle.
"The crónica urbana has a long history in Mexico," he says. "These essays range from personal reflections and anecdotes to reflections on the city, itself, to stories about events and celebrities – all aspects of middle-class life in Mexico City."
Working in the national archives at UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Peer will focus on two major essayists, Salvador Novo López (1904-1974) and José Joaquín Blanco (born 1951).
Named Mexico City's official chronicler, Novo was a writer, poet, playwright, translator and UNAM professor. Blanco, an UNAM student around the time of the 1968 massacre – he would have been 17 when it happened – is a novelist and translator who won the 1985 best-screenplay Ariel (Mexico's Oscar) for "Frida, naturaleza viva," in which he imagines the dying artist Frida Kahlo recalling scenes from her life.
"All of the essays I'll be looking at have to do with Mexico City and how it has changed over time," Peer says. "From the revolution through the 1950s, when Novo was at his peak, the population grew astronomically. One of the main themes is how explosion of the population in the metropolis changed peoples' lifestyles, especially for the middle class."
That theme holds true for the 1970s and 1980s, when Blanco began extending his reach. He eventually appeared in some 50 newspapers.
Peer expects that his research will result in articles and conference presentations, as well as becoming part of his dissertation.
Born and raised in California, he earned a B.A. in literature at Bennington College in 2006. He was attracted to the CUNY Graduate Center "because of the wonderful comparative literature program. It's a fascinating place, a crossroads of people from so many backgrounds, languages and disciplines."
Peer envisions an academic teaching and research career. He now teaches writing at Baruch College. "It's a lot of fun."
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Valeria Munt
Acting with Humanity
Tensions, always high between India and Pakistan – two nuclear-armed countries that have fought several wars – peaked in 2008 after Pakistan-based terrorists wreaked slaughter and destruction in Mumbai. "Cricket diplomacy" helped cool things down.
In 2011, India's prime minister invited Pakistan's president to join him at a Cricket World Cup semi-final match. Away from the pitch, India eased its visa policies in disputed Kashmir and Pakistan released an alleged spy it had held for 27 years. Relations warmed even more in 2013, when Pakistan's cricket team traveled to India and, in as close to a diplomatic ending as possible, won 2-1. When the teams met again in 2015, almost one billion people cheered around the world.
"Sports has the capacity to impact diplomatic relations in a way that nothing else can, particularly between countries that have had a contentious relationship," says Valeria Munt (Brooklyn College, B.A., political science, French and Spanish literature '08; City College, M.A., international affairs'15).
Humanity in Action, an international nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization, has awarded her a Diplomacy and Diversity Fellowship. Over four weeks in the spring of 2015, the 24 fellows – all American and European graduate students – were scheduled to meet government, business and academic leaders in Berlin and Washington, D.C. Their goal, in the organization's words, was to "consider ways of promoting constructive diplomacy in a changing world through innovative and inclusive approaches to national and international issues."
Munt's master's research into sports diplomacy made her a natural for this coveted fellowship. "Cricket," she observes, "has not solved the deeply rooted rivalry they've had since independence from Britain in 1947, but it di help them start communicating." She also delved into the "Ping-Pong diplomacy" in 1971-1972, which opened the door to President Nixon's historic visit to Cold War adversary China.
Munt learned English in her native Peru before coming to the United States – "which has so many opportunities" – and to Brooklyn College, where she completed her triple-major bachelor's degree in four years. She became a U.S. citizen in 2011 and intends to marry another CUNY alumnus, Vitali Angelyniauk (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, B.A., '15).
Munt has had several internships: with U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, U.N. Women and the U.S. State Department's consulate in Barcelona.
Munt now works in community relations in the district office of state Sen. Gustavo Rivera of the Bronx, who told her about the Humanity in Action fellowship because of her interest in international relations. In 2009, when Rivera worked for U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, he was one of 20 politically active young Americans to join 20 Dutch counterparts in Humanity in Action's Pioneers program, where they considered issues like technology, politics and social media. The Dutch government sponsored Pioneers to celebrate the 400th anniversary of discovery of the Hudson River.
Munt says that eventually she wants to shift into a job in international relations, "which is not only what I've studied, but also what I'm passionate about."
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Hogai Aryoubi
Putting Aesthetics in Context
If you're shopping in Afghanistan, don't make the western-ethnocentric mistake of calling that lovely rug for sale in the market a work of art. Rugs, in the Afghan conception of aesthetics, are purely functional. Oil paintings are art.
Hogai Sarbeland Aryoubi (CUNY B.A., Anthropology of Cross-Cultural Aesthetics '13) explored such differences as an undergraduate. Now, as she prepares to plunge into a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Turkey, she looks forward to teasing out similar differences in cultural perception in a new country.
"I've always been interested in teaching abroad," she says. "I went to Istanbul last summer on a tour through Europe and the Middle East. I loved Turkey and wanted to fully immerse myself in the culture, so I applied."
When she was 10, Aryoubi and her family arrived in Washington, D.C., on refugee visas from Afghanistan, and she stayed in the area through high school. When it was time for college, she headed to New York, first to Pace University and then to the CUNY Baccalaureate program. "What I wanted to study was available nowhere else. At Pace, I had over $50,000 in loans for two years and I'm still paying them off, but at CUNY I had to borrow only $2,000 to pay for materials."
Aryoubi adds, "I loved CUNY, because I wanted a quality education at a diverse public university that is accessible and affordable, and when I graduated I posted it on my profile. It's like I graduated from New York City. I loved my mentor, Dr. Regine Latortue, a former professor and chair of the Africana Studies Department at Brooklyn College, and am still in touch with her by email.
"Because she taught anthropology-based classes, she understood my interest in how the perception of aesthetics varies according to culture and helped me create my unique CUNY B.A. program."
After graduating from CUNY, Aryoubi joined Teach for America. She now teaches 10th- grade English and handles a caseload of special education students at Cesar Chavez High School for Public Policy in Washington, D.C. This spring she is to receive an M.S. in educational studies from Johns Hopkins University.
After completing her Fulbright, she expects to pursue a doctorate in education. Unless, that is, "Cuba opens up. I'd like to teach there for a year, too."
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Ilana Gelb
Fighting the Good Fight Against Violence
Asked how she came to create her own major in violence, conflict and development, Ilana Gelb mentions her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who had kept silent about her experiences until she felt she had to respond to a Princeton professor's lecture in a course she was auditing.
That opened the floodgates, launching Gelb, her mother and grandmother on an six-year, three-generational speaking tour, often in schools, churches and synagogues; their presentation has broadened to encompass the horrific spectrum of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Gelb, who expects to earn her bachelor's degree in 2016 from the CUNY baccalaureate program and Macaulay Honors College at Baruch College, spent spring 2015 studying abroad in Hunter College's Latin American development studies program. In Costa Rica, she taught English in a slum to adults who hadn't finished high school while studying sustainable development, human rights and gender studies.
Her next stop is Jaipur, India, where she will use a 2015 U.S. State Department Critical Language Scholarship to study Hindi; the federal program aims to increase the number of Americans who speak languages that are not common in the States.
For fall 2015, she will move on to Varanasi, also known as Benares, the holiest of the seven sacred cities in Hinduism and Jainsim. Besides taking classes and continuing language studies, she will work with Guria, a nonprofit organization that fights the sexual exploitation of women and girls. She will work in Guria's afterschool childcare program, which serves children who are growing up in the red light district. She also will conduct research into human trafficking and second-generation prostitutes.
This will be her third trip to India. The first was in a gap year following graduation from high school in Westchester County that focused on the work of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in sustainability. "I fell in love with India," she says. She returned in 2013 in the summer after her freshman year to work with Guria.
After that experience, she and a friend, Eleni Efstathiadis, a Macaulay Honors College and CUNY baccalaureate student majoring in global health, started an anti-trafficking organization at Macaulay called Avasara ("opportunity" in Hindi). "We've been doing educational programming and consciousness-raising at monthly meetings and conferences," she says. "We invite survivors, people from NGOs and governments. The May event is on the psychology of victimization. The events are free and open to the public."
Gelb mentioned two influential professors. Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, a professor of fine and performing arts at Baruch College, "was very supportive of my studies of gender-based violence and genocide." At Hunter College, adjunct Phelim Kine, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia Division, "brought a concrete sense of what it is to work in human rights" in his course in religion and ethnic conflict in Asia.
After graduation, she says, "I want to continue to work in the area of mass violence and trying to prevent genocide and gender-based violence."
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Angglelia Sutjipto
A Bias Beater
Angglelia (Angel) Sutjipto (CUNY baccalaureate, Genocide Studies, '13) will learn how other countries have dealt with discrimination and resistance with a 2015 Humanity in Action Fellowship.
She joins a select group of students and recent graduates from the United States and Europe. They will meet in Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris and Warsaw this summer for a monthlong exploration of countries with a history of discrimination against minority groups and the resistance that emerged. Humanity in Action, an international educational organization, seeks to nurture future leaders interested in remedying injustice.
Sutjipto was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, and migrated to the United States in 2003, at age 12. Shortly thereafter, her temporary visitor's visa expired and she became undocumented. When she got to CUNY, she was eligible for in-state tuition, but not federal or state tuition assistance. As a result, she babysat, tutored and applied for scholarships, while her mother worked as a cashier to pay for each semester's tuition fees. Sutjipto also asked professors to place textbooks on reserve in the library because she could not afford to buy them. "It was quite a struggle, even with CUNY's low tuition," she says.
In her sophomore year at Hunter College, she took a class that shifted her focus toward preventing genocide and mass atrocities. "It was a very special course which allowed me to work with Holocaust survivors," she says. "I appreciated being able to spend time with the survivors and learning first-hand about the Holocaust. One of them asked me if genocide could ever be prevented, and that question has stayed with me ever since."
Through the CUNY Baccalaureate Program, she crafted an individualized degree to explore that question. Her faculty mentor was political science professor John R. Wallach, founder and chair (2010-2013) of the Hunter College Human Rights Program. "I owe much to the CUNY B.A. program and professor Wallach for allowing me to explore the issue of genocide prevention on a much deeper and critical level."
Sutjipto's interest in genocide prevention led her to become the projects coordinator at Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights. The institute aims to strengthen laws, norms and institutions to prevent mass atrocities and increase human rights protection. Despite being undocumented, she is protected from deportation and can work under President Barack Obama's 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order, an order that a future president may revoke.
During her free time, she volunteers as the communications coordinator for RAISE (Revolutionizing Asian American Immigrant Stories on the East Coast), a pan-Asian, membership-led group of undocumented immigrants.
"Given my own lack of immigration status and interest in the genocide-prevention and human rights field, I would like to be able to combine these two issues because immigrant rights are human rights," she says. "I look forward to better understanding the immigrant rights' movement in Europe this summer through the Humanity in Action Fellowship."
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Joshua Trinidad
Speaking Up for Diplomacy
Joshua Trinidad has pursued languages for pleasure. Now, with a federally funded 2015 Charles E. Rangel Graduate Fellowship, he will prepare to put them to work as a Foreign Service diplomat.
Thanks to the grant, Trinidad (CUNY B.A./Hunter, World Languages and Literatures/Translation and Interpretation, '12) will pursue a master's at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. The top-tier fellowship program includes two internships, one on Capitol Hill this summer and one in an embassy overseas next summer.
"I'm going to grad school to study international relations, because even though I have a linguistic background and have lived in France, Japan and Colombia, I don't have a firm grasp on how foreign policy, the State Department and the American government work. I'm shifting gears," he says.
Born in Miami and raised by grandparents in Puerto Rico, Trinidad spoke Spanish as a child, but lost it back in Florida before his academic quest led him to recapture it while also taking up French and Japanese.
He started at the public Florida Gulf Coast University in 2002, but financial difficulties forced him to leave to work full time. Two years later he was in New York City, working, establishing residency for in-state tuition and saving money. He started at Hunter College part time in 2006 while providing full-time customer support for a software company.
The CUNY Baccalaureate Program attracted him "because I couldn't settle on just one language to study. With French and Spanish, I could major in Romance languages, but I had to get Japanese in there."
He enhanced his Spanish with a winter session in Puerto Rico financed by a $1,000 CUNY B.A. Terrence L. Tenney Scholarship for Language Study.
He also won three other federal grants. A Benjamin Gillman International Fellowship took him to Paris to study French, Japanese and translation in 2011-2012, while simultaneously teaching high school English for the French Ministry of Education. He follow that up with a Critical Language Fellowship, studying Japanese in Kyoto, Japan, in the summer 2012; he had started learning that language in high school, when he was obsessed with anime. A 2013-2014 Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship sent him to the Universad Cooperativa de Colombia in Bucaramanga.
In 2014 he won a private Kathryn Davis Fellows for Peace Scholarship to study Japanese full time at Middlebury College. "You have to sign a pledge to speak only Japanese, hang out only with people in your program and only watch TV in Japanese. You can get so fluent in two months!"
Trinidad says he is aiming for the State Department's public diplomacy track. Public diplomacy work includes giving speeches in the local language, doing public relations abroad and organizing cultural and academic events. "I'm really excited about getting into a career that brings about positive change."
The 30 Rangel Fellowships this year encourage members of historically underrepresented minority groups to serve as Foreign Service officers. They agree to work as diplomats for at least five years after graduation.
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Carlsky Belizaire
Encountering Cultures Here and Abroad
Carlsky Belizaire, the son of Haitian immigrants, has always been drawn to Asia. "I'm intrigued by exploring different cultures, different people, different languages," he says. "I'm thoroughly American, but I'm used to a Caribbean culture and western philosophies, so it's great to see how the other half of the world lives."
As an undergraduate at Macaulay Honors College at Queens College, Belizaire used Macaulay's Opportunity Fund for winter-session study in China and Japan. Graduating with a B.A. in political science, he intends to explore another Asian nation, Taiwan, in greater depth with a 2015 Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship.
"I'll be jumping into the deep, because I haven't studied Mandarin," he says. "I'm going to learn as much as I can before I leave."
Belizaire foresees a career at the intersection of government and politics, possibly with a degree in law or public policy.
Through Macaulay, as a freshman he interned in the Brooklyn District Attorney's Vehicular Crimes Unit, helping with trial preparation.
In the summer after his junior year, he interned in the Capitol Hill office of Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-Queens) through CUNY's Edward T. Rogowsky Internship Program in government and public affairs. "It broadened my life goals. It was life-changing."
During his senior year, he joined the CUNY Service Corps to work at the Urban Justice Center, a nonprofit anti-poverty agency that provides legal and advocacy services to vulnerable New Yorkers. "I help the attorneys. Now we're filing cases against the New York City Housing Authority, which hasn't made critical repairs in some of its buildings," he says. He also has helped with grant writing and done community outreach, spreading the word about free legal clinics.
He was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, received a John "Tito" Gerassi Memorial Award from Queens College's Political Science Department and was in Macaulay Honors College's Hertog Scholars Program, which explores the human condition through multidisciplinary seminars that immerse students in the great works in literature.
Belizaire says his sensitivity to the needs of other people was heightened through Queens College's Center for Ethnic, Racial and Religious Understanding. "I'm a dialogue fellow [facilitator] in discussions we host on campus on tough issues, like Arab-Israeli conflicts, race relations in the United States and the identities society places on us," he explains. "Our point is to bring together people of various cultures and ideas so that we can have constructive and safe conversations."
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Anabel Pérez
Being American
Anabel Perez Jimenez has won the public service trifecta. She landed a 2015 New York City Urban Fellowship to complement prior internships in Washington with Rep. Charles Rangel and in Albany with Assembly Member Luis R. Sepúlveda, who then hired her in his Bronx district office.
Not bad for an undocumented immigrant from the Dominican Republic who continues to challenge the nasty narrative that undocumented immigrants are a weight on society.
"I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to represent the minority community in the United States," says Perez (Baruch College, B.A., Public Affairs '15).
She immigrated with her mother at 12, but didn't learn her status until she was 16, taking SATs and planning how to pay for college. "It was very unfortunate to have to turn down a scholarship for valedictorians simply because I didn't have a Social Security number."
With her mother's savings, she enrolled in Borough of Manhattan Community College. After six classes and a 4.0 average, she won BMCC's Out in Two Scholarship, an academic program designed to help students graduate within two years. She finished her A.A. in business administration in three semesters and transferred to Baruch, intent on becoming a bilingual accountant.
Then came her Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute internship. "I didn't have any public policy experience and I didn't think they'd accept me," she says. But President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order in 2012 protected undocumented young people who had arrived in this country as children; they would not be deported and could work.
She arrived in Rangel's office in 2013 before Congress shut down for two weeks after failing to pass a budget. With federal employees furloughed, interns stepped up to continue constituent services. "All of a sudden, the internship became more hands-on, since interns were exercising their leadership and interpersonal skills while getting through the crisis," she says. It took a month for Congress to get back on track, including catching up with postponed hearings. "It was a remarkable experience."
Her mentor, Distinguished Lecturer Michael Feller, then encouraged her to seek an internship in Albany. She was placed with Sepúlveda, then a freshman. "During non-session days, I ran the upstate office. During session days, I had the privilege of going to committee and caucus meetings on his behalf while assisting in outreach to his constituency." In 2014, he offered her a part-time job as executive administrator of his Bronx office.
As a New York City Urban Fellow, Perez she will explore policy-making in a city agency for nine months. She hopes for a role in immigrant affairs. Afterward, she is considering law school – and longs for a way immigrants like her can move toward citizenship.
"People seem to lack understanding of how challenging it is to be undocumented," Perez says. "I'm an American just like everyone else, just not on paper."
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Evgeniya Kim
An Irrepressible Global Do-Gooder
Through a childhood of migration, repression and exile, Evgeniya Kim found the elements that would shape her outlook on life.
She was born in Uzbekistan, where Russian was her first language. There, Kim says her family adjusted as an ethnic minority even as they struggled to retain their cultural values.
"Koreans are a tiny minority in Uzbekistan, so it was important to hold on to my Korean heritage even though we did not even speak Korean," Kim said. "When you are a minority – racially, ethnically, religiously as was the case with my family – it is easy to become marginalized, especially when the country is poor and corruption is commonplace. My father had to work really hard as a farmer to provide for our family and my mother stayed at home even though both of them had engineering degrees."
At the age of 14, Kim and her family immigrated to the United States, where they were granted asylum. After graduating from Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Queens in 2006, Kim enrolled at Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College and majored in international relations ('10).
"What I loved the most [about Macaulay] is the diversity of the student body that made me feel right at home, especially because of my own unique background," she said.
Kim, 27, is one of four CUNY women awarded a 2015 Paul &Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. As a fellow, Kim will receive up to $90,000 for graduate studies at the Yale School of Management where she is currently pursuing her MBA.
In Uzbekistan, Kim's Korean heritage and Russian upbringing often brought uncomfortable questions from classmates. Yet, she found solace on the tennis court as a member of Uzbekistan's national junior tennis team and bonded with players she met during international tournaments.
"When I was just a kid, playing tennis internationally, I started traveling around Central Asia and had my first big tournaments in India and Indonesia. That's when I met so many players from all around the world and fell in love with the international experience," she said.
While at Macaulay, Kim continued to expand on her global perspective. She studied abroad in Greece and also interned at the Open Society to address human rights issues in Uzbekistan. Through volunteer work with a non-profit organization, she also traveled to Thailand, Russia, Korea and Switzerland. She recently came back from an MBA trip to South Africa.
Combining her love of international development and business, Kim began working at the Soros Economic Development Fund, analyzing the impact of the fund's investments on 21.4 million people across 20 countries. As a future career, Kim hopes to become a consultant for organizations that have a similar global impact.
"I loved how diverse our projects were," Kim said. "From a financial services project in Mexico, agriculture deal in Ghana to a hospital in India and a port in Tanzania, I felt that our work reached those that were most in need."
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Amal El Bakhar
Seeking Justice, Gender Equity
Growing up in a conservative, immigrant Arab-American household – the first in her family to graduate from high school or college – Amal El Bakhar has had to navigate carefully. Tradition would cast her in the role of housewife like all the other women in her family, but she craved a life in the public sphere.
"I always wanted to serve greater purposes," she says. "My father is extraordinarily supportive, but members of my extended family still say, 'You're a woman. You shouldn't do that.' "
"That" includes graduating from Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College in 2011 with a B.A. in both biochemistry and women and gender studies. It includes a 2011 Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs, which trains recipients to become agents of urban change; she interned with government and private organizations in Pittsburgh. It also includes Harvard Law School (2016) and an upcoming summer job in litigation at Cravath, Swaine &Moore, for nearly two centuries one of the nation's premier law firms.
Her latest achievement is a 2015 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, which provides up to $90,000 to fund graduate study.
El Bakhar's family moved from Morocco when she was 9. She attended public schools, including Thomas Edison Career and Technical High School, where for four years she studied pharmacy and chemistry. "I loved it and I'm still in touch with a couple of teachers."
Biochemistry was a natural at Hunter. So was gender studies, given her evolving thoughts about family and the greater world, She volunteered at Bellevue Hospital's emergency department and worked at the Center for Reproductive Rights, whose purpose doubtless startled her family. In her academic work, she studied the similarities between her religious beliefs and her emerging consciousness of gender equality. She wrote an award-winning honors thesis on Iran's health care laws for women and a second thesis on the current legal status of reproductive rights in the United States.
These experiences factor into her goal of becoming a sex crimes prosecutor. "Sex crimes are one pivotal way in which women and children are undermined in society," she says, adding that sex crimes occur in all communities, regardless of religion, ethnicity or willingness to speak about it. "When sexual assault happens, you can't solve a problem if you pretend it isn't happening," she says.
"I've had extraordinary mentors in my life," she says, including Hunter President Jennifer Raab, Macaulay Dean Ann Kirschner and Ellen Chesler, formerly a distinguished lecturer at Hunter's Roosevelt House and now a senior fellow at the unrelated Roosevelt Institute, where she directs its Women and Girls Rising Initiative. "Their support helped me immeasurably."
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Jake Levin
Heading into Public Service
Like everyone serving in World War II, Jacob Levin's grandfather had to wear combat boots. As a pilot, that proved problematic. His boot got stuck under a pedal during a training exercise, causing the plane to crash. Family lore says he walked away uninjured and wrote to his commanding officer about what had happened. The result was an Army-wide directive that pilots could wear less cumbersome dress shoes. His grandfather, safely shod, went on to fly dozens of missions in Europe.
"We've been in public service for some time," jokes Levin, one of just 58 winners of a 2015 Harry S. Truman Scholarship. The federally funded $30,000 grant supports juniors and seniors who agree to work in public service for three of the seven years after earning their graduate degrees.
A junior known to most as Jake, Levin expects to graduate in 2016 from Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College with a double major in political science and philosophy and a minor in history.
He says public service is "hard-wired" into his genes. His mother is a clinical social worker, his father a teacher and his other grandfather was a Justice Department attorney. Serving his college community, he was recently was re-elected to Brooklyn College Student Government.
Levin's public service journey began with constituent casework. During a yearlong internship with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, he helped veterans with benefits, discharge status upgrades and other issues. He also coordinated a team of interns who helped Gillibrand select her nominees for the federal service academies from more than 650 applications. For his Truman application, he prepared a policy proposal aimed at improving hiring practices at the Veterans Affairs Health Administration.
He also interned with the Mayor's Office of Veteran's Affairs and has volunteered for both the city Office of Emergency Management and the Department of Homeless Services.
Although most of Levin's political experience has been in New York, he says, "My political education began growing up in New Hampshire, which gets very active in primary season. During my last year of high school in 2012, I worked for a newspaper photographing presidential candidates. It was a great way to learn about politics." He keeps his legal residence there, for "my liberal vote means more in New Hampshire than in New York."
Levin's biggest public service accomplishment to date is creating TEDxCUNY, a University-wide version of the idea-spreading TED Conference, whose provocative talks have garnered billions of online hits. "I said, 'CUNY has incredible ideas. Why don't we have our own conference to share them with the world?' "
With support from CUNY central and Macaulay Honors College, he secured a license from the TED organization that makes TEDxCUNY the nation's only TEDx university conference to unite and represent multiple campuses.
At its November 2014 debut, 13 speakers discussed "access": accessing your mind, community, world and future. The conference reached capacity, and there have been more than 40,000 views at www.tedxcuny.com/videos. Levin is now organizing the fall 2015 TEDxCUNY conference.
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Natasha Masub
Teaching English Before Med School
(head) Teaching English Before Med School
As Natasha Masub neared graduation, she had to choose between two rewarding alternatives: starting medical school or taking a 2015 Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Bangladesh, where her parents were born.
Luckily, she will get to do both, for she was able to defer medical school for a year until she returns from her ancestral homeland.
"I really wanted to go to Bangladesh just to experience what life is like there," says Masub (Brooklyn College, B.A., Sociology, '15), who was born in Texas and reared in Queens and Nassau County.
She graduates having completed the rigorous premedical curriculum that's part of Brooklyn College's eight-year B.A.-M.D. program. Participants are selected in their senior year of high school and are encouraged to take a liberal arts major. Successful completion of the program guarantees a seat at SUNY Downstate College of Medicine in Brooklyn.
"I was really inspired by my mother, who is a pediatrician and who takes a lot of pride in caring for children," she says. "I really wanted a career where I could be proud of the work that I do every day and could improve the health and well-being of patients."
As part of her requirements, Masub completed a clinical internship, shadowing a gastroenterologist at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola. She tutored as part of a community service requirement. "One reason I wanted the Fulbright is that I enjoy teaching and have a lot of experience," she says.
Through a Michael Garil Memorial Scholarship that she received from Brooklyn College, she also participated in research into stomach and esophageal cancer in Summer 2014 at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
The Fulbright will plunge her into the densely populated and fast-developing land that her parents left in the 1980s and 1990s. Masub speaks Bengali at home and studied reading, writing and speaking it in afterschool classes as she grew up. She looks forward to total immersion to expand her vocabulary and fluency.
She isn't yet sure what kind of medicine she will practice once she finishes medical school, but she says her senior thesis points toward a continuing interest: immigrants' access to health care. Her thesis included a quantitative analysis of health care utilization by Asian immigrants. "Regardless of socioeconomic status, just being an immigrant predicted lower access to health care," she says.
"All immigrants can attest to the fact that language skills and familiarity with the way health care works have a huge impact on whether you can access health care as much as you should," she says. "If we don't understand the language and the insurance system and how referrals work, it compromises the health care we receive. And if doctors are not familiar with immigration and the groups they're working with, it can lead to compromised health care. I'll take that with me when I pursue medicine."
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Evelyn Okeke
Chasing Stars Biologically
Evelyn Okeke wants to spend her life conducting biological research at the highest level – and if she has her way, it will literally be at the highest level: in space.
Okeke (College of Staten Island, B.S., Biology, minors in Chemistry and Biochemistry, '13), received a 2015 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support doctoral research in Rutgers University's Biochemistry Program.
She investigates a specific protein that functions in DNA repair and the primary process that most cells use to clean away unneeded or damaged proteins. "Discovering what it is that allows this protein to repeatedly shuttle between the cell's nucleus and cytoplasm would improve our understanding of nuclear protein turnover [that is, the how cells keep house] and facilitate new research that could alleviate human disease outcomes," she explains.
Born and raised in Germany by a German mother and a Nigerian father, she came to the United States in 2009 to attend college. Attracted by Staten Island's semi-rural setting, she happily found that the College of Staten Island had "an outstanding biology program." She studied in CSI's Verrazano School selective honors program and graduated as co-valedictorian with a 4.0 GPA..
Her undergraduate research with biology professor Abdeslem El Idrissi factored prominently in two book chapters about the function of taurine, a nonessential amino acid, and its role in blood pressure and vasoactivity (the constriction or dilation of blood vessels).
She appeared at several scientific meetings. Her first presentation at a global forum was the 18th International Taurine Meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco, in 2012. That summer, she interned in the Department of Protein Science at Merck &Co. and studied on scholarship in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. In the summer of 2011, she worked as a research assistant in the lab of cell biologist Douglas Robinson at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In the summer of 2013, she had a neuroscience research internship in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands.
Among other scholarship, fellowships and grants, in 2012 Okeke received a $25,000 United Negro College Fund/Merck Undergraduate Science Research Scholarship Award, one of just 15 awarded that year. She also received an honorable mention from the federal Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship competition.
All this is prelude to her dream job: Flying into space with either NASA or the European Space Agency after she earns her doctorate. "I'm totally fascinated with space, and I'd love to get an internship at NASA, which has top-notch scientists." If she doesn't make it into space, she notes that "NASA labs do a lot of exciting research that I would love to be part of."
With her National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Okeke may be a step closer to liftoff. The award is the most prestigious for graduate studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). This federal grant provides $138,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
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Carla Spensieri
Word Up!
Carla Spensieri's grandfather didn't know how to read. Her father dropped out of high school because it was too far from his family's farm in rural Italy; after emigrating in 1964, he became a contractor and real estate developer. Her mother's family left Cuba in 1959 in advance of the impending revolution.
"Ever since I was little, I've been motivated to make my parents proud of me and to bring honor to the Spensieri-León family," says Spensieri (Hunter College, B.A., Italian Culture and Civilization, '14; Queens College, M.A.T., Childhood Education, '15). "My family created a new life in the United States," and her 2015 Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship is "a happy reminder that everything lost along the way was so that we could gain everything we now have."
Language is central to her life. Her parents converse in English. She speaks to her mother in Spanish, who, having lived most of her life in the United States, usually answers in English. Her father became fluent in Spanish while managing Latin American construction workers. He didn't talk with his daughter in Italian until she showed significant interest in her late teens; now he will joke "I don't understand" if she responds to him in English.
Spensieri intends to add Portuguese to her repertoire during her Fulbright year while teaching English to prospective English teachers at a public university in Brazil. Portuguese "is not the final frontier, but the next step. I plan on learning French, Chinese, Arabic – at least 10 languages. My dream is to connect with people all over the world. You learn so much. Plus, I nerd out on grammar and etymology. I love what words mean," she says.
She accelerated Hunter's normal two-year graduate education program into one year, taking three courses in the summer, five in the fall and four in the spring – all while fulfilling her student observation requirement at three public elementary schools in Queens and babysitting for two families. "I like to be busy. Busy is my normal."
Spensieri began her bachelor's at St. John's University and studied in its program in Rome before transferring to Hunter's Italian program. "Private education was too expensive, and the value of public education was greater," she explains.
After her Fulbright, she may add a bilingual education or TESOL (teacher of English to speakers of other languages) extension to her existing New York State elementary certification.
Spensieri says she'll probably teach at a New York City elementary school before
possibly venturing on to schools across the world. She also likes to write both
fiction and nonfiction, which opens further possibilities. And then there's the
option of conducting research, perhaps in an education think tank, "where you can
test your ideas and potentially make great change."
She knows just the kind of students she wants. "When you're a teacher, you don't want to teach students whom you can give a book to and they'll learn," Spensieri says. "You want to teach the struggling learners who really need your help."
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Eric Becker
Translating More Than Words
"Translation brings us something different, a perspective that we don't have in English," says Fulbright Award winner Eric M.B. Becker (Queens College, MFA, Creative Writing and Literary Translation '15).
Becker, 31, was a journalist in Missouri, the Metropolitan Opera's senior website manager, and assistant managing editor at the literary journal "Asymptote." In February 2015, he became editor of "Words Without Borders," a monthly magazine of works in translation; April's issue focused on Tamil literature and May's on Palestinian works.
"In the past translators said, 'Let's yank it into idiomatic English,' but today there's more attention to respecting the original," says Becker. "Translators need to be cognizant of the nuances and try to reflect the connotations and histories of the words used in the original."
For his master's thesis, which he expects to publish in 2016, Becker translated "Estórias Abensonhadas," a story collection written in Portuguese by Mia Couto that grapples with Mozambique's identity following the 1976-1992 civil war. Couto won the 2014 Neustadt Prize for International Literature, which is granted for a body of work and often foreshadows a Nobel Prize, and was a 2015 finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, which also is given for a body of work.
Couto's stories "concern how memory around national events is formed, along with the desire to forget. Mia is a poet, so I have to pay attention to the rhythm of his sentences, as well as to what they're saying." Luckily, Becker could email Couto to discuss how best to render his words. A PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant supported the project.
With his Fulbright, Becker will travel to Brazil to work on two translations. One is a story collection by Eric Nepomuceno, himself the translator of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez into Portuguese. The other is a historical novel by Edival Lourenço, "Naqueles morros, depois da chuva" ("Amid those hills, after the rain"), which traces the rise and fall of an 18th¬-century soldier of fortune during a mining boom in remote central Brazil.
"Translation is much more than translating the words on the page; it's translating the context in which the characters are living to readers who may not have any familiarity with the country," Becker says.
Lourenço's novel poses particular challenges. Set in the colonial past, it uses a
unique regional language; Becker will research that dialect and historical events at
museum archives, cultural institutes and universities in Rio de Janeiro and in
Goiás, an interior city near where the events took place.
Becker got hooked on the language about 10 years ago when he met the woman who became his wife, Luisa, a documentary filmmaker and multimedia journalist from São Paulo, Brazil.
For more information see ericmbbecker.com.
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Xavier Medina
Living an American Life
The first time Xavier Medina remembers meeting his mother was when he was 7, getting off the airplane from Ecuador in 1993. "She left when I was 2 and would call and send pictures," he says. "She left for economic reasons, to build a better life for our family."
Medina didn't realize that he had entered the country illegally until he applied to college. "I was accepted at good four-year schools, but being undocumented, I couldn't apply for scholarships and didn't have the resources to pay myself. I took a break, worked and enrolled at LaGuardia [Community College], where my immigrant status didn't matter and everything came together."
Now Medina (LaGuardia Community College, A.A. Liberal Arts-Social Science, '15) has won a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship, which provides about 85 of the nation's top community college students with up to $40,000 a year for up to three years of baccalaureate study. Medina will attend Columbia University and major in political science.
Through LaGuardia's honors program, he has twice presented on lesser known aspects of immigration at the Northeast Regional Honors Conference, which attracts two- and four-year college students.
At Niagara Falls in 2014, he described the Bracero Program, which between 1942 and 1964 let Mexican laborers temporarily work in the United States, primarily in agriculture. "My premise was presenting the inefficiencies of power between nations," he explains. "When Mexico sits down with the United States, it always has the short end of the deal."
At the 2015 conference in Gettysburg, he analyzed NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, through it's impact on Mexican hog farmers. "They could not compete with the cheaper pork that flooded the Mexican market via transnational U.S. hog corporations and, as a result, had to close or sell off. They laid off thousands of Mexican workers who later crossed into the U.S. to work for American hog companies, which was ironic. When NAFTA started, it was supposed to benefit all the countries involved, but that didn't happen, because both sides were thinking only of the corporations, not the human element."
He praises LaGuardia's honors program. "It's such an amazing experience to take classes with professors who are so passionate about what they're teaching," he says, particularly Karen Miller in urban studies, James Wilson in English and Karlyn Koh, the honors program director. Meanwhile, he and other honors students provided peer assistance to other students.
For the moment, Medina is protected from deportation and can work under President Barack Obama's 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order, but he finds the situation perplexing. "I know very little about Ecuador. I grew up knowing and loving this country."
His family keeps him centered. "Once I came here to the U.S., I was raised by my mother and sister, who have influenced me in many ways – especially by supporting my goals and pushing me in the right directions."
With the Jack Kent Cooke award, he's further on his way.
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Sean Thatcher
Protecting the Coastline
On a geology class field trip in 2014, two College of Staten Island students – 2015 Goldwater Scholarship winner Sean Thatcher and classmate Victoria Rivelli – discovered something geologically new about the exhaustively studied Palisades cliffs, along the west flank of the Hudson River.
Examining an outcrop of sedimentary rock that had been newly exposed at a construction site in North Bergen, N.J., they spotted sedimentary structures in the sandstone that shouldn't have been there. And when they and lecturer Jane Alexander, the sedimentology teacher, presented their findings at a Geological Society of America conference, they rocked the place.
"We're still analyzing rock samples that we took back to the lab to determine chemical variations associated with the Palisades Sill intrusion," he says, referring to the formal name of the igneous rock that, as molten lava, flowed into fissures in the earlier sedimentary rocks.
Footnote: The only reason the class visited that site (a parking lot for a new bank) was that it was wheelchair-accessible. That's a must for Thatcher, who became quadriplegic after fracturing his neck in a diving accident six years ago, when he was 18.
"I don't let the wheelchair slow me down," Thatcher says. "I refuse to stop living. I like to be productive and get things done. I think that using a wheelchair has actually enhanced my ability to think outside the box."
Thatcher expects to graduate in 2017 from CSI's selective Verrazano School honors program with a major in biology and a minor in geology. He says he took the geology class to "get a better understanding of the environment and its complex interactions."
In his Goldwater application, he proposed a research project that would help him continue developing expertise in protecting and enhancing coastal ecosystems, which are under attack by human activity and climate change. His proposal, studying how fertilizer affects the growth rates of dune grass, would take place in CSI's greenhouse.
Thatcher will spend this summer at the CUNY Graduate Center on a CUNY Pipeline Fellowship, which supports students who intend to earn Ph.D.s and teach in their fields at the university level. His pipeline project involves redeveloping the coastal ecosystem with sand dunes, coastal wetlands and other natural approaches to protect human communities from future storm surges, like those that swept across Staten Island during Hurricane Sandy.
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Dalila Ordonez
Outthinking Brain Proteins
Neurons – nerve cells that both send and receive electrical signals – communicate through a complex signaling system that includes a protein called alpha-synuclein. Scientists know that mutations in the gene that produces this protein can cause familial Parkinson's disease. They also know this protein is found in the brains of people with all forms of the disease.
Dalila Ordonez (Hunter College, B.A., Biopsychology '13), a doctoral student in Harvard University's Molecules, Cells and Organisms Program, intends to discover precisely how alpha-synuclein leads to nerve degeneration. Her research is supported by a 2015 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Working with Mel Feany, a professor in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, Ordonez studies fruit flies that have been genetically modified to overexpress alpha-synuclein, which recreates the clinical features of Parkinson's disease. Just like humans, fruit flies with this condition develop problems with movement and lose nerve cells that are essential for survival.
"I'm looking into genes that have homology to humans," Ordonez says, using a term referring to genes that have a similar function. "If what we find is true in the fruit fly, it's likely that we'll see the same in a mouse and in humans."
She hypothesizes that alpha-synuclein causes toxicity by misregulating another protein, actin, which is found in all nerve cells. When actin goes awry, it interferes with the workings of mitochondria, the parts of cells that generate energy. If this turns out to be true, Ordonez explains, researchers will have a new model for alpha-synuclein dysfunction in Parkinson's disease, which could open up additional avenues for treatment.
As an undergraduate, Ordonez conducted research with Hunter professor Jesus A. Angulo, a neurobiologist who concentrates on the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which brains recover from injury. In his lab, she studied the drug methamphetamine, which, like cocaine, not only induces addiction, but also kills neurons. Ordonez contributed to three of Angulo's papers, which all dealt with the neurotoxicity of methamphetamine and how the brain attempts to recover from damage.
Her interest in neurodegeneration started when she studied with an expert, Hunter professor Maria Figueiredo-Pereira. In her lab, Ordonez worked toward developing a rodent model to study the role of neuroinflammation in the degeneration of dopaminergic neurons, which are specialized neurons that are the main source of dopamine in the mammalian central nervous system. Dopamine is a chemical intricately involved with functions including movement, and the loss of these neurons (for reasons yet to be explained) leads to Parkinson's disease.
Ordonez, born in Ecuador, was raised in New York City and attended Grover Cleveland High School, where she became entranced with chemistry and biology. Now teaching an introduction to biology at Harvard, she looks forward to an academic career in research and the classroom.
The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious award for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This federal grant provides $138,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
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Sean DesVignes
Jazzing on the Black Experience
April 4, 2015. A South Carolina police officer shoots the fleeing Walter Scott in the back. Soon after, Brooklyn College junior Sean DesVignes, already nationally known for his poetry and 2015 recipient of a $34,000 Beinecke Scholarship for graduate study – an award given to 20 "young men and women of exceptional promise" – writes "Quittin' Time."
Music happens when change doesn't, it erupts
and boils over, and in these troubling times,
it's the only thing that makes me weep, all other
avenues of despair have been explored.
In 1960, with the struggle for civil rights aboil, drummer/composer Max Roach and a stellar band channeled the black experience, from Africa to the Americas, from slavery to reconstruction to African nationalism, in a landmark, explicitly political jazz album, "We Insist."
"I summoned the bones of Max Roach to reinterpret his album in the light of extrajudicial killings of black people," DesVignes says.
DesVignes mentions Albert Ayler, who a few years after Roach's album coerced his saxophone into atonal "humanlike screams and yells. That's something I gravitated toward, because how do you write screaming, how do you write frustration?" DesVignes manages in "Quittin' Time:"
… I encouraged Roach
to use more accidentals, sharps and flats
that took the shape of takedowns
mutating into chokeholds, wallets mistaken
for pistols, a mildness of color,
as a part of Roach's band, one would enact
a loudness war against the officers' skin …
With Black and Trinidadian roots, DesVignes grew up in Brooklyn with a wide range of musical influences. His grandfather introduced him to jazz, particularly the avant garde, free jazz of saxophonists Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. "They wanted to translate the human experience," he says.
DesVignes also has a lighter touch. In "Roundtree," an evocation of Ayler's former girlfriend, Carrie Roundtree, he starts, "The horn was his/first girlfriend" and ends, "I knew we wouldn't last./He never played anything I could dance to."
DesVignes began writing poetry when he was 13 and attending New York City's public schools. At 18, he enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology, near Urban Word NYC, which offers spoken word and poetry workshops to underprivileged youth. He entered the now-defunct New York Knicks Poetry Slam in 2011, winning second place and a $7,500 scholarship. He also performed 15-minute one-man poetry shows before transferring to Brooklyn College in 2012.
Brooklyn already had a poetry slam team, which he coached that year. In 2013 it competed at CUPSI, the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational, taking second place and best performance by a team, while DesVignes won as best new poet. At 2014's CUPSI, he won as best poet while Brooklyn won for best writing by a team.
In 2013, DesVignes won a scholarship to Cave Canem, the premier retreat for African-American poets. There, he workshopped poems that evolved into his first published work, a 2014 chapbook called "Take My Eyes to the Dry Cleaners." He is now working on "A Mighty Long Time," a collection anchored in the free jazz and calypso movements of the 1960s, "using music as a muse to comment on the black experience in today's world."
Meanwhile, he says, Brooklyn College provides him with "a strong foundation in the canon. Shakespeare, Chaucer and the romantic poets are my favorites."
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Nathaniel Sibinga
Fishing for Sustainability
Google "health benefits of salmon" and you'll find articles listing four, or seven or 10 reasons to eat it. Beneficial omega-3 fatty acids always top the list. In the wild, salmon get omega-3s by eating smaller fish and insects, which get them by eating microscopic, free-floating plants called phytoplankton.
But fewer salmon and other fish come from the wild. Habitat destruction, pollution, climate change and overfishing have diminished ocean fish populations. Since 2013, fish farms have served up more than half the seafood on the world's tables, but not without controversy. Farmed salmon raised on artificial diets have less of those cherished omega-3s, while fish farms are faulted as environmentally unsustainable.
Which brings 2015 Fulbright Fellowship winner Nathaniel Sibinga, to flies.
"Fishing in the wild can't produce enough to meet demand, so fish farming is here to stay, whether people like it or not," says Sibinga (Brooklyn College, M.A., Biology '15). "The question is: Can we find a way to farm fish in a more environmentally friendly way?" He hopes that novel food sources will bridge the gap between factory-style fish farms and "whatever the fish equivalent of a grass-fed cow is."
With his Fulbright, Sibinga will join AquaFly, a study led by the Norwegian National Institute of Nutrition and Seafood Research. As its name implies, AquaFly feeds salmon proteins and fats that are derived from insects that ate omega-3-rich plants. His laboratory research at the University of Bergen will examine how fish metabolize a beneficial plant protein.
After earning the equivalent of an associate degree at tuition-free Deep Springs College, a highly regarded nontraditional school in rural California where no more than 26 students also work on a ranch, Sibinga got his bachelor's in marine biology at Brown University.
There, he delved into the fundamental difficulties surrounding management of ocean fish stocks. "It's not as though you can ethically prevent subsistence fishing communities in the Philippines or Mexico or even Japan from trying to find something to eat. You have to give them a viable alternative."
Sibinga's research led him to Brooklyn College Distinguished Professor Emeritus Martin P. Schreibman. He champions urban aquaculture (growing fish in small-scale city locales) and aquaponics (using fish waste to fertilize hydroponic vegetables, which grow in water, not soil). Could Schreibman's approach hold the key to reducing overfishing?
Schreibman, semi-retired, was reluctant to take on another student. But Sibinga emailed, phoned and then "started showing up at his office until I convinced him to let me work with him."
Over the past three years, they've grown tomatoes and cucumbers in concert with tanks full of fish, raised composting red worms as a potential fish food and investigated feeding protein-rich duckweed – a pond-killing scourge – to farmed tilapia.
For that project, Sibinga harvested buckets of duckweed from the Prospect Park Lake and carted it on the subway back to Brooklyn College. In his lab, he turned duckweed into pellets that the resident tilapia adored.
"I've been here a long time," Schreibman says, "and Nate is one of the best students who have come along. He's quite the star."
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Joshua Mehigan
Guggenheim for Rhyme
In his widely acclaimed poetry collection, "Accepting the Disaster," Joshua Mehigan takes on grave topics filled with tragedy, suffering, and death. But, the dark message of his poems comes veiled by the musicality of rhyme and meter.
As an example, Mehigan's narrative poem "The Orange Bottle," uses uncanny, tender rhyming verse to tell the story of a man who stops taking his medication and suffers a psychotic episode before being arrested and sent to a mental hospital.
The clear orange bottle was empty.
It had been empty a day.
It suddenly seemed so costly
and uncalled for anyway.
For Mehigan, part of his joy in writing poetry is the thrill of composition, playing with words and language, and also rhythm and meter. However, he also uses poetry as a vehicle to discuss societal problems and issues in contemporary life.
"In writing poetry, there are ideas that I have about the world that I would like to get into people's heads, subtly," he said.
Mehigan, a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center and teaching fellow at the College of Staten Island, was named a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. Appointed on the basis of "prior achievement and exceptional promise," Mehigan joins 174 Guggenheim winners that include ten poetry Fellows.
His first book, "The Optimist," was a finalist for the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry and winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize.
His most recent book, "Accepting the Disaster," was cited in the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere as a best book of 2014. Critics have called him "one of our finest emerging poets."
Mehigan's poems have also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and several anthologies.
When asked how he became interested in poetry, Mehigan said he started writing when he was about 10 and attributes his poetic beginnings to childish self-absorption.
"It wasn't because I loved literature. It wasn't because I loved writing. It was mainly just to try to impress people probably," Mehigan joked. "But, eventually, I woke up and realized there is something to this."
For inspiration, Mehigan goes to favorites who have also tackled difficult subjects such as W.H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Edgar Bowers, Gwendolyn Brooks, and John Clare. Although his poetry focuses on dark topics, Mehigan explains that he doesn't dwell in constant sadness.
"I'm obsessed with death. It's true. I am," he said.
"So if I'm walking down the street and see something in a particularly poignant way that demonstrates some interesting thing to me about death or my fear of death, then it will find its way to a poem. But it's not like I walk around weeping," he said with a laugh.
While he has enjoyed teaching at the College of Staten Island, Mehigan is grateful for the Guggenheim award, which he will use to focus on his next collection.
"I'll take off a year from school and it will allow me to live, so that I can work. So that I can write poems. And that is really and truly, an amazing gift," he said.
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Karissa Caputo
Her Chinese New Year
Growing up on Long Island, Karissa Caputo dreamed of living in a Chinese environment. At Jericho High School and at CUNY, she took every opportunity to study Mandarin so she'd be ready. Now her time has come for a year of immersion.
With a 2015 Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Taiwan, Caputo (Macaulay Honors College at Queens College, B.A., Spanish Education, minor, Mandarin, '15) will plunge into Chinese language, history and culture and prepare herself for a teaching career.
"I want to be a foreign-language teacher," she says. As a student teacher, she taught Spanish at Floral Park Memorial High School, and she graduates with New York State certification to teach it. She also hopes that when she returns from her Fulbright, "I'll pass the state exams and also will be certified to teach Mandarin. I'm also interested in TESOL," or teaching English to speakers of other languages. "There are so many options."
When she was applying to colleges, she chose Queens because it offered strong foreign-language programs. "I didn't know about Macaulay Honors College until the tour guide went over the requirements. I thought I might as well apply because of the opportunities it provides, and I was happily surprised when I got accepted."
She used her Macaulay Opportunities Fund, a grant that Macaulay Scholars can apply to a wide range of educational options, to perfect her Spanish through a Hunter College language and literature study trip to Argentina. And in Summer 2014 she made it to China for six weeks of study of the language and mainland culture and society at Shanghai University, with time in Beijing, as well. Taiwan, she notes, will be markedly different from the mainland.
Despite her strong performance speaking Mandarin in academic settings, "I definitely struggled over the summer," Caputo concedes. But, she says, "I grew more confident at the market. My Chinese is nowhere near perfect, but as long as I'm able to communicate with someone, that's OK for now."
She says that when she wrote her personal essay to apply for the Fulbright, "My main theme was hope. Language opens so many doors. It gives you the world. As American society and global society become more interconnected, it's important that we equip our students with the tools to succeed. Although English is spoken worldwide, it makes such a difference when you can speak to someone in their own language. I look at it as the fuel to keep relationships growing."
She adds, "Any language student hits a rough patch, thinking they won't ever have a conversation, but if they have hope, it will propel them along the way. In my study of Mandarin, I learned the modern word for 'hope' used to mean 'to look into the distance with expectation.' I think that's the perfect definition."
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Joshua Tanon
From BMCC to NASA
One day, when humans travel to Mars, they may explore the planet with a remote-controlled glider bearing sensors designed by Joshua Tanon (Borough of Manhattan Community College, A.S., Engineering Science '15).
During a 2015 NASA aerospace engineering internship at Edwards Air Force Base in California, Tanon will join a team of top-flight college students to create those sensors and prepare them to fly by the end of the summer.
Why a glider? Mars' atmosphere is less than 1 percent as dense as Earth's and engines are heavy. A superlight, unpowered aircraft with a wide wingspan could generate enough lift to ride Mars' faint air currents.
Why Joshua Tanon? "As a kid, I used to lie in the backyard watching planes and hoping they'd land in my backyard," he says. "In high school, I got this ambition to become a fighter pilot from a video game" – a dream that hasn't gone away. "I have a passion for wanting to serve. If I can't fly planes, learning about aerospace engineering would allow me to fix them."
After graduating from Bronx Community High School, Tanon enrolled at Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology in Queens. In 16 months he graduated licensed to maintain aircraft and their engines. "I learned the ins and outs of aircraft – body, engines, the differences between turbojet and reciprocating engines and how to fix both. I liked working with my hands and seeing how things work." He worked a stint as an aircraft mechanic.
But there was more to learn. In Fall 2012 Tanon enrolled in BMCC's engineering science program and, soon after, in Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, or ASAP, a CUNY initiative that helps community college students earn degrees faster than usual. "My ASAP advisor was there very step of the way – a very personal connection that had me graduate on time," he says.
Tanon studied mechanical structures like bridges, buildings, cars and, of course, planes. "BMCC gave me a theoretical approach to everything in engineering," he says. He also became president of the Physics and Nanotechnology Club on his way to becoming a Phi Theta Kappa scholar.
He intends to earn his bachelor's degree at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
"Without ASAP, I don't believe I would have applied to top engineering schools nor NASA," he says. "As an ASAP student leader, I show students the door. My story is a testament to what ASAP did once I walked through that door."
The NASA internship runs for 10 weeks and, when Tanon boards the airplane for the trip to California, he'll be making his first flight after years of dreaming of being aloft. With a laugh, he says, "That's pretty shocking, considering my ambitions."
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Jamel Love
Electoral Collegian
Women tend to vote more often than men do, and that generally holds true across ethnic groups. In every presidential election since 1980, the proportion of eligible females who voted (64 percent) exceeded that of eligible males (60 percent), and the actual number of female voters was higher, too, census data show. Among African-American women, however the gap in turnout is larger than that of any other racial group.
In his senior thesis, Jamel Love (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, B.A., Political Science '15) analyzes American National Election Survey Study Data (ANES), the major academic source of election information, to explore a possible explanation of the increasing African-American gender gap. "Because African-American women are attaining degrees at much higher rates than their male counterparts, this may explain the rising gap in voter turnout," he says, noting that considerable scholarly literature points to "the intricate and positive correlation between educational attainment and voter turnout."
Next fall, Love intends to enter a political science doctoral program at Rutgers University, which will waive tuition and provide a five-year, $23,000 annual stipend. In 2015 he also won a $4,000 grant from the American Political Science Association's Minority Fellowship Program and was awarded honorable mention for the prestigious and highly selective Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship.
He intends to concentrate in American politics and minor in methodology. While his eventual dissertation topic is too far off to contemplate, he does say, "I'd like to do research concerning the ways different groups engage the political system and what motivates them to do so.
Love has been a Ronald E. McNair Scholar in a program funded by the U.S. Department of Education to prepare students from underrepresented groups for graduate study. Through McNair, he has presented at several conferences and, in the summer of 2014 he conducted research at Vanderbilt University as a part of the Leadership Alliance SR-EIP program, where he worked with political science professor Marc J. Hetherington on a project exploring polarization in Congress on key health care legislation. Love also is the current president of his schools' National Political Honor Society Chapter
Love praises the support he has gotten from faculty, including his thesis advisor, associate professor Andrew Sidman. His first mentor was associate professor Dara Byrne, who also directs the honors program; she oversaw his first independent research into political debates young people were having about same-sex marriage on Facebook. He also mentioned Ernest Lee, associate director of John Jay's McNair Program, McNair director Jessica-Gordon-Nembhard and his McNair mentor, associate professor Demis Glasford.
Love says his long-term goal is teach political science at the university level and to ultimately produce research that influences policy benefitting society's most vulnerable groups. "As a professor I hope to serve as a resource for other young minority students who may not have resources or support to succeed in professional fields," he says.
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Susybel Pimentel
Peeling Off Labels
Police officers stop kids countless times every day, perhaps because of their hoodies, or because several are hanging out or because of what the officers perceive to be their attitude. Even if the youngsters haven't done anything criminal, these interactions can have negative effects, researchers find.
"If someone keeps telling you you're stupid or good for nothing, you start acting that way because you come to believe that's how you are," explains Susybel Roxana Pimentel (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, B.A./M.A. in forensic psychology, 2012). She received a 2015 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support doctoral study at the University of Cincinnati into how the negative labels officers may apply to youngsters can have such powerful effects.
Pimentel cites the pioneering work of Columbia University sociologist Robert Merton, who coined the phrase "self-fulfilling prophecy" in 1948 to explain how a false assertion can be so powerful that it influences behavior until it becomes true. Two 2013 studies compared what happened to juveniles whom police had stopped and had not stopped; several years later, those who were stopped (some possibly for good reason) were more likely to report engaging in delinquent or criminal behavior.
"We need to understand why that's true," Pimentel says. Since those studies relied on secondary data, she intends to do primary research in Cincinnati neighborhoods, looking at what's actually "happening in these interactions, and is it possible that when police officers have positive experiences with youth there won't be negative impacts?"
She is designing her research with her advisor, associate professor Christopher Sullivan, who directs graduate studies at the University of Cincinnati School of Criminal Justice.
Pimentel was born in Peru and immigrated with her family to Connecticut when she was in middle school. She enrolled at John Jay intending to become a psychologist involved with domestic violence counseling, but in 2010 teenagers out for kicks on Halloween fatally stabbed her best friend as he walked home in New London.
"I was shocked, angry, sad," she says. "I had two options: I could be angry and blame the kids, or I could try to do something better, try to understand what would lead individuals to do that."
As a Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Scholar at John Jay, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Pimentel plunged into research, which culminated in her master's thesis. It examined the underlying mechanism that links trauma exposure to academic performance among college students. She did this work under her mentor, associate professor Maureen Allwood, whose research focuses on the developmental effects of trauma and exposure to violence and their impact on school failure, delinquency, substance abuse and suicide.
After graduating in 2012, she worked for a summer with the Vera Institute of Justice, surveying young New Yorkers about the NYPD's stop and frisk practices. For the next two years, she worked as a cognitive skills facilitator with teenagers jailed at Rikers Island. She helped them work through a behavioral intervention program developed by the nonprofit Osborne Association that aims to reduce recidivism and promote conflict-resolution and other life skills.
"It was a good fit," she says. "The kids had to talk about their lives, building trust, setting goals, trying to understand their own behavior. And when they went home, I had to make sure they were actively looking for jobs or going back to school."
Ultimately, Pimentel would like to work as a policy researcher for a government or public policy agency and do some work outside the United States, perhaps in her native Peru.
The National Science foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious award for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This federal grant provides $138,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
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