text:
"A record 16 outstanding CUNY students in 2012 won National Science Foundation awards of $126,000 each for graduate study in the sciences. No other university system in the Northeast won more. Coached by our world-class faculty, CUNY students are winning the nation's most prestigious awards and continue their research at MIT, Yale and other top graduate schools. Study with the best during the 'Decade of Science' at CUNY."
— Chancellor Matthew Goldstein
View the Mentor Award-Winners at CUNY >>
Rhodes Scholars
Rhodes Scholarships, the oldest international fellowships, bring outstanding students from around the world to Oxford University in England.
Rhodes Scholarship
- 2011
Rhodes Scholarship
- 2009
Rhodes Scholarship
- 2005
Rhodes Scholarship
- 2005
Rhodes Scholarship
- 1992
- 1991
Rhodes Scholarship
- 1983
Rhodes Scholarship
- 1939
Goldwater Scholars
Barry M. Goldwater Scholar- ships, awarded to college sophomores and juniors, provide up to $7,500 a year for educational expenses.
Goldwater Scholarship
- 2012
Goldwater Scholarship
- 2011
Goldwater Scholarship
- 2011
Goldwater Scholarship
- 2011
Goldwater Scholarship
- 2011
Goldwater Scholarship
- 2009
Goldwater Scholarship
- 2009
Goldwater Scholarship
- 2008
Goldwater Scholarship
- 2007
Goldwater Scholarship
- 2006
Goldwater Scholarship
- 2005
Truman Scholars
The Truman Scholarship Foundation awards $30,000 for graduate study leading to a public service career.
Truman Scholarship
- 2011
Truman Scholarship
- 2011
Truman Scholarship
- 2007
Truman Scholarship
- 2006
Truman Scholarship
- 2005
NSF Graduate Research Fellows
These highly competitive fellowships support exceptional students whose research shows clear evidence of contributing to important scholarship in their fields.
NSF Fellow
- 2012
Theresa Lynn
NSF Fellow
- 2012
NSF Fellow
- 2012
NSF Fellow
- 2012
NSF Fellow
- 2012
NSF Fellow
- 2012
NSF Fellow
- 2012
NSF Fellow
- 2012
NSF Fellow
- 2012
NSF Fellow
- 2012
NSF Fellow
- 2012
NSF Fellow
- 2012
Graduate School Acceptance, Award, Honor, Fellowship
CUNY Colleges
Accepted to University of Manitoba Master's in Anthropology,
Laura A. Kingsley
Accepted to MFA program in Ceramic Sculpture, California College of the Arts,
Accepted to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Ph.D. program in Biomedical Sciences,
Accepted to New York University as a McCracken Fellow in the Ph.D. program in sociology,
Accepted to Ph.D. program in Physics, CUNY Graduate Center,
Accepted to Tulane University master's in disaster resilience leadership science,
Accepted to University of Arizona Joint Ph.D. Program in Anthropology and Linguistics,
Accepted to applied mathematics Ph.D. program, North Carolina State University, with teaching assistantship,
Julian Flores
Josh and Judy Weston Public Service Scholarships Program 2012,
Harvard Medical School, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship 2012,
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship 2012,
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship 2012,
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship 2012,
Tenure-track position at BMCC 2012, Student Speaker for Graduate Center Commencement 2012,
Accepted to Columbia Teachers College master's in speech pathology program with a minority scholarship, ,
Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholarship 2012, Phi Theta Kappa All-New York Academic Team 2012,
Accepted to Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Junior Summer Institute,
Accepted to Program at SUNY College of Optometry, Doctor of Optometry Program,
Paid Summer Intern at the NASA/GSFC Lunar & Planetary Science Academy 2012,
A Valedictorian with a Purple Heart 2012, 2012,
Phi Theta Kappa All-New York First Team and Coca-Cola Silver Scholar 2012,
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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."
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."
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."
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."
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.
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."
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."
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."
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.
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."
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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
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."
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."
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?
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."
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."
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
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."
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."
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.
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."
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.
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.
Cheryl Mazzeo
Accepted to Albert Einstein College of Medicine Ph.D. program in Biomedical Sciences with annual scholarship of $31K+ and many other benefits.
Robert Riggs
"The unprecedented rise in the number of people confined in America's prisons and jails constitutes one of the most pressing social issues facing society today," wrote Robert Riggs (CUNY BA in Urban Anthropology and Mass Incarceration, 2012) in his application to the CUNY BA program.
Then and now, he is a research associate with the Bard Prison Initiative, which offers college coursework and degrees to prisoners in five New York prisons, under the auspices of Bard College, one of the few remaining in-prison college programs since the 1994 withdrawal of federal funding for prisoner education.
Riggs' goal has been to use social science methods, particularly ethnography, to develop powerful data about mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on certain populations and to shed light on how "people, families and communities actually live incarceration and the cycle of imprisonment and re-entry that has become its stock-in-trade," he writes.
Riggs was a transfer student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice when he heard about CUNY BA. Before his acceptance, he'd learned that an article he wrote on employing prisoners re-entering society was to be published in a journal, Dialectical Anthropology.
At John Jay, he became a work-study student in the anthropology department, and although he was only assigned seven hours of work a week, he regularly put in 25 instead, organizing and analyzing data for two major federally funded studies. With his mentor, Professor Ric Curtis, he helped complete a research project on violence against undocumented immigrants in Hempstead, Long Island. They co-authored other articles and writings that have been or are slated to be published, including one on the "War on Drugs" and its impact on Latino communities. He completed a number of research courses and Independent Studies, covering topics such as teen prostitution in Atlantic City, the use of medical marijuana in Rhode Island, gang violence in large cities and the market for methamphetamine in New York City.
Riggs has been accepted to the Ph.D. program in sociology at New York University, with a five-year Henry McCracken Fellowship.
"CUNY BA was crucial to my success in being accepted into graduate school," he wrote. "The degree freed me to build upon what I had already learned and to work with my faculty mentor to construct a curriculum that was extremely meaningful to me; it gave me the flexibility to couple my coursework with Independent Studies and to participate in undergraduate research that led to co-authorships on final technical reports and on a publication in an international, peer-reviewed journal. I am entering graduate school with the goal of conducting an ethnography of a New York City neighborhood with a high rate of incarcerated residents. This project will hopefully constitute my dissertation research. I will be able to do it thanks to the solid foundation I gained in CUNY BA."
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.
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."
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.
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."
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.
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."
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."
Zujaja Tauqeer
Taking Up Where Her Parents Left Off
In early 2013 Rhodes Scholarship winner Zujaja Tauqeer (Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College, 2011) was well on her way to completing an Oxford University doctoral degree in the politics of state-provided welfare. When she has her D. Phil. diploma in hand in 2014, she expects to start an M.D. program at Harvard Medical School. Her goal is a career in shaping international health policy.
These interrelated projects continue the trajectory this Staten Island resident began in Brooklyn College's eight-year BA-MD program. As an undergraduate, she volunteered for the campus emergency medical squad, researched the neuroscience of autism and wrote about radicalization in Pakistan.
In 2011 she received a rare Rhodes Scholarship, which is considered the world's premiere academic award; approximately 32 are awarded each year. It covers expenses for two or three years of study at Oxford in the United Kingdom.
Her doctoral thesis examines how post-colonial governments provide welfare as a means to build state authority and legitimacy. Her historical case study is Pakistan, which she and her parents fled to escape religious persecution. Her parents, both physicians who ran a free rural clinic, sought asylum in the United States after her father was arrested and vandals destroyed the clinic because they belong to the minority Ahmadi sect of Islam.
When she received the Rhodes, Tauqeer said it would "give me invaluable training as a 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."
In the summer of 2012, after her first year at Oxford, Tauqeer interned at the 3QuarksDaily blog, which aggregates what the website calls "interesting items … in the areas of science, design, literature, current affairs, art and anything else we deem inherently fascinating." She remains an assistant editor, helping to fundraise and post items of note. The blog's creator, Corey Robin, is a Brooklyn College political science professor whom she had met when she took his "Modern Political Thought" class. "He was the one who originally pushed me to apply for the Rhodes," she said.
Ann Kirschner, University Dean of Macaulay Honors College of The City University of New York said: "Zujaja is a remarkable woman — an outstanding scholar and with a demonstrated commitment to using that scholarship for the benefit of others. 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 responded: "It's not false modesty when I say that it was all my professors and scholarship advisers that are heroes for being so selfless and setting aside their time to guide me to achieve anything I did."
Tauqeer is the seventh City University student to win a Rhodes. The others are: David L.V. Bauer (Macaulay Honors College at 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).
Brooklyn college Rhodes Scholar Zujaja Tauqeer Watch Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6DytH2KTv4
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
Jamar Whaley
Jamar Whaley
Jamar Whaley, of Queens College, won a 2009 Goldwater Scholarship. The awards, given by the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program established by Congress and named for the late Arizona senator, are $7,500 per year for one or two years. They go to students pursuing math, science or engineering to cover various college costs. Whaley, a neuroscience/psychology major, will apply his research to a clinical setting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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