uate Research Fellowships are among the

Transcription

AWARDS_StS student awards program 7/18/13 3:43 PM Page 3
T
he 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships are among the
nation’s most prestigious awards for graduate
study in science, technology, engineering and
math. This year, The City University of New York
proudly celebrates our 23 graduating seniors and
recent alumni who won 2013 National Science
Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships —
more than any other public university system in
the Northeast. We’re pleased to spotlight the University’s “All-Star
Science Teams” of NSF winners, along with a selection of other
honorees from the Class of 2013. The external awards they’ve won
underscore the caliber of CUNY’s graduates. These range from federally funded Fulbright Fellowships for research and teaching abroad to
acceptance at top-notch graduate and professional institutions around
the country, where CUNY alumni are pursuing law, medicine and the
full range of arts, sciences and social sciences. New alumni are also
entering the workforce, engaging in public service or contributing to
charitable activities to enhance their personal growth. This special
edition of Salute to Scholars magazine salutes some of these remarkable students. See www.cuny.edu/allstars for a larger listing. The
University congratulates all members of the Class of 2013 for enriching
our nation and, indeed, our world.
Warm best wishes,
William P. Kelly,
Interim Chancellor
CUNY 2013 AWARD RECIPIENTS 1
Mizanur Ahmed
Macaulay Honors College
at Brooklyn College, ’13
Jonas E. Salk Scholarship
Kyle Athayde
at Hunter College, ’13
Coro Fellowship
Hunter Gross
Critical Language Scholarship (China)
Anna Groysman
Philip Liu
at City College, ’12
National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship
Ivana Mellers
Fulbright Fellowship
Kristina Navrazhina
Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship
and Excellence in Education Program
Ayodele Oti
Princeton in Latin America
Christopher J. Parisano
at Queens College, ’08
Aleksey Ruditskiy
Emma Schatoff
2
CUNY 2013 AWARD RECIPIENTS
Julius Edson (City College,
B.E. in chemical engineering,
2012), now a doctoral student at the
University of California-Irvine, has won a
National Science Foundation Graduate
Research Fellowship by suggesting a new way
of attacking the rising number of lethal
bacteria that are immune to antibiotics.
He wants to use a substance called
chitosan that’s found in the shells of crabs,
shrimp and other marine animals. Chitosan
can damage the bacterial cell membrane
through an electrostatic interaction. “The
chitosan sticks to and ruptures the cell
membrane of microbes then serves as an
antenna to direct the body’s own immune
system to attack,” Edson says.
But chitosan dissolves only in an environment that is more acidic than the human
body can tolerate. Edson intends to chemically modify chitosan so it can readily function in the body without losing its
innate properties.
He started at City as premed
but became interested in this
field while studying colloidal
systems with associate professor
Ilona Kretzschmar. This made
him realize that a degree in chemical
engineering was “a perfect fit.” He adds: “I’ll
still be able to help in the medical field.”
Edson was born in Nigeria. As a youngster,
he contracted various illnesses and was not
expected to survive. “But I am here and
healthy,” he says.
With survival came a sense of responsibility to help others. Edson immigrated to the
United States at 7. As a City undergraduate,
he won a scholarship from the Louis Stokes
Alliances for Minority Participation, an NSFfunded program to encourage underrepresented minority students to pursue a
baccalaureate degree in the STEM fields. It
enabled him to conduct water-treatment
studies in Colombia. He has also conducted
research in Sweden and Austria.
Nikoleta Despodova (John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, B.A. in forensic
psychology, 2013) won a National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship to study her hypothesis that intimate-partner violence among same-sex couples may be seen —
by criminal court jurors — as less serious, less likely to reoccur
and less likely to lead to physical injuries.
“The stereotypical image of rape and intimate-partner
violence is of a man being stronger and assaulting a woman, but
when faced with two male or two female partners, jurors have
doubts about who they’re supposed to believe,” Despodova
Jan Dominik Stepinski
Jaimie Stettin
at Hunter College/CUNY BA, ’11
Alison Wong
Jeannette K. Watson Fellowship
says, citing studies that appear to demonstrate this.
Despodova, who plans to pursue a doctorate, has suggested
deepening the research by giving questionnaires to
240 jury-eligible community members, followed
Madeline Yap
Fulbright Fellowship (Korea)
by a mock trial. She also proposed investigating the extent to which myths and stereotypes affect such judgments.
Despodova first questioned how evidence is
evaluated at 16, during the trial of the motorcyclist who fatally injured her grandfather. She
completed four years of baccalaureate studies in English and
literature in her native Bulgaria. Then in 2008 she moved to the
United States to pursue a degree in forensic psychology. She
Pietro Barone
Baruch College, ’13
London School of Economics
and Political Science,
MSc in International Relations
Mayara G. Guimaraes
Harnisch Scholarship and
Golden Key International
Honor Society, 2012
attended a John Jay open house and enrolled.
At John Jay, she engaged in varied related research. She
worked with professor Elizabeth Jeglic to examine the attitudes
of student jurors; the research was
supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s Ronald
E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement
Program, which
prepares underrepresented students for
doctoral work. She
also conducted independent research
with professor
Mark Fondacaro
and in professor
Margaret Bull
Kovera’s lab.
4
Ralph E. Labaton
Georgetown University,
Law Center, JD
Dustin Lee
IPG Marketing
Fellowship Award, 2012
Marco Leung
Brooklyn College,
Masters of Science
Logan Luo
Pace University,
Lublin school of Business, MS
Lulu Mero
IFM, University of Strathclyde, MSc Finance
Irina Mironova,
Salk Scholarship, 2013
Elaina Montague
University of Nebraska-Lincoln,
Liberal Arts, PhD
Rukmani Nayyar
Baruch College,
Masters of Marketing
Hongjie Pan
University of Edinburgh,
Business School, MS
Alina Pavlova
Macauley Honors College
at Baruch College, ’13
Tulane University Law School, J.D.
Svetlana Rafailova
at Baruch College, ’13
Baruch College,
Master’s Degree
Rebecca Seidman
Hunter College,
Masters in Social Work
Marissa Stuart, Baruch MBA
Leader of Tomorrow by The St.
Gallen Foundation for International
Students in Switzerland
Ellen Adams
Brooklyn College, M.F.A. ’13
Fulbright 2013
Mizanur Ahmed
State University of New York,
Downstate Medical Center,
College of Medicine, MD
Mizanur Ahmed
Brooklyn College, ’13
JESS, 2013
Nathalie Louise Belkin
Long Island University, Palmer
School of Library Sciences, MLS
Dane Christie (City College
2013, B.E. in chemical engineering) — who will attend Princeton
University in the fall — was awarded a
Research Fellowship. The Jamaican-born
Christie once pitched for the Toronto
Bluejays’ Dominican Republic farm team.
He now aims to earn a doctorate.
“My mom told me I needed to think
about college,” he says. “But that was the
farthest thing from my mind. I was a 6foot, 7-inch left-hander.” Ultimately,
after two years with the team, he joined
his mother in New York, worked in
construction for four years and then
entered the Hostos-City College dualdegree engineering program.
Hostos assistant professor Yoel
Rodriguez, who teaches chemistry and
physics, “gave me the push and the belief
in myself I was lacking at the time,”
Christie says. At City, he found new
mentors in professor John
Lombardi and associate professor
Ilona Kretzschmar — with whom
Anthony Bukher
Long Island University,
Registered Occupational
Therapist OTR
Ember Kane Skye Lee
University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, PhD Program
(Sociology)
Mireille Gold
Brooklyn College, ’13 M.S.E.
University of Washington,
PhD Program (School Psychology)
Sarah Ita Levitan
Brooklyn College, B.S. ’13
2013, Columbia University,
Computer Science Program
Christie researched colloidal
assembly.
His NSF proposal evolved from his
research into improving the efficiency of
organic solar (photovoltaic) cells, which
Anna Groysman
State University of New York,
Downstate Medical Center,
College of Medicine, MD
Jonathan Lin
Columbia University,
PhD Program (Sociology)
generate electricity from sunlight.
For that proposal, Christie suggested
researching the purely organic bulkheterojunction solar cell. “I proposed an
experimental protocol, which would boost
efficiency,” Christie says. That could lead
to better, cheaper and more environmentally friendly solar panels. This approach
could be applied to other technologies,
Quanda Johnson
Fulbright 2013
Yvonne Juris
Columbia School of Journalism
Daniel Margolis
University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, PhD Program
(Political Science)
including LED lights and batteries.
Christie is married to Ashley Christie,
whom he met when she was a student at
Baruch. She transferred to City College
when he did and will enter New York
University’s master’s in social work
program.
Aaron Dolor (Hunter
College, B.A. magna
cum laude in biochemistry, minor in linguistics, 2012) won a 2013
National Science Foundation Graduate Research
Fellowship by proposing a novel way of exploring how
“specialized zwitterionic fats” function.
“Specialized zwitterionic fats” refers to a layer of fat
that separates the interior of the cell from its environment. It has positive and negative electrical charges at
different locations, plays a critical role in determining
whether molecules can get in or out of the cell, but it’s
not clear precisely what mechanism it uses.
Dolor, now a doctoral candidate at the University of
California-San Francisco, suggests studying the impact
of synthetic zwitterionic fats with an inverse electrical
charge.
“The idea is to understand how, if you reverse the
charge, it affects lipid biophysics,” he says. “That can
inform our knowledge of how molecules get into cells,
which is potentially important for delivering drugs in
diseases like cancer and HIV. Perhaps, if you change the
charge, drugs can get through the cell membrane.”
Dolor has not decided whether to use his grant for this
project. He can transfer it to other research.
Born in New York City and raised on the Caribbean
island of St. Lucia through age 6, Dolor worked for two
years as an undergraduate researcher in the laboratory
of chemistry professor Charles M. Drain. In 2012, he
won a CUNY Jonas E. Salk Scholarship for graduate
research.
6
Meryl Horn (Hunter
College, B.A. in biology,
2012), now in a doctoral program at
the University of California-San Francisco, will use her National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to develop a better
understanding of how memory works. She intends to
use her grant to look at how the brain’s circuitry that
controls contextual memory can be altered in drugaddicted animals.
She explains: “A rat that is addicted to cocaine might be
trained to push a lever in a box to get a dose. If it is later
put back in the box, even after it has been weaned from
the drug, it is likely to press that lever again and again.”
In explaining how this is relevant to human behavior,
Horn says, “For addicts, contextual cues can trigger
processes that lead to relapse and can thus be detrimental to their recovery.”
She decided to pursue her interest in science when
she was a receptionist across the street from Hunter
College — after she had earned a baccalaureate degree
from Clark University in international development and
social change.
In her first year at Hunter, when she was also working
full time, she encountered associate professor Roger
Persell, who was teaching an honors introduction to
biology class. Ultimately, she says that in neurobiology
she found “the perfect combination of hard scientific
rigor that was missing in international development.”
She then spent three years in the laboratory of assistant professor Carmen V. Melendez-Vasquez.
At UC-San Francisco, Horn switched her field of
research to learning and memory and is studying with
neurology professor Patricia Janak, who holds an
endowed chair in addiction research.
Luciano Melo
American University, PhD Program
Marika Plater
Brooklyn College, ’13 M.A.
Rutgers University
Benjamin Rudshteyn
Macaulay Honors
at Brooklyn College, B.S. ’13
Goldwater Scholarship 2012
Yale University,
Chemistry Doctoral Program
Ayesha Arif
SUNY Downstate Medical College
Martha D’ua Awereh
University of Cincinnati
Medical College
Jerald Cherian
Priyanka Chopra
Kathy Chu
Sarah Dienstag
Einstein College of Medicine
Emmanuel Ekwedike
City College, MS in Math,
GEM Fellowship Award
Mikhail Goman
Vadricka Etienne, a second-year
doctoral student at the CUNY
Graduate Center, has won a National
Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship that will help her explore whether the
approximately 776,000 U.S. residents of Haitian
ancestry will cling to their roots into the third
generation. Or, like so many other groups, will
dissolve into the great American melting pot.
A second-generation Haitian-American who
grew up in Orlando, Fla., Etienne (University of
South Florida, B.A. in communication, minors in
Abraham Haimed
SUNY Downstate Medical College,
EME Program
Megan Hanson
MA in English at BC Touro College
Resource Center Coordinator,
Priya Haran
Penn State, PhD in Biomedical Science
sociology and anthropology, 2011) says that
previous research on the assimilation of children
of immigrants has focused on their ethnic identity choices but not on how members of the
second generation try to convey their culture to
their children.
“While it was less complicated for the first
generation to pass on their cultural heritage
because they often raise their children in ways
similar to their own upbringing, the second
generation has refashioned the cultural heritage
of their parents as they participate in the American culture, which begs the questions of not only
Koby Herman
what is the second generation passing on but
how,” she writes.
Her hypothesis is that most likely the third
generation will not maintain its Haitian identity,
particularly in cities without strong cultural
support. (The 2010 census tallied
Stephanie Christie
PREP Program in Biomedical
Science at Mt. Sinai
Robert Colbourn
MD/PhD program
Gerri Connaught
Hunter School of Social Work
about 268,000 New Yorkers
who were born in Haiti or
were of Haitian
descent.)
She envisions
taking an ethnographic approach
involving interviews with families.
Etienne says she applied to CUNY
because of three professors —
Philip Kasinitz, Nancy Foner and
Richard Alba — “who I kept
coming across as I did research on
assimilation and black identities”
and who have written about immigration by various groups, assimilation and ethnic politics.
8
Ru Chen (City College,
B.E. in chemical engineering, 2013) — won a
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Scholarship and will enter
a doctoral program at the University of
Delaware in the fall.
She will explore the possibility of
detecting cancer by looking for abnormal
variations of glycoproteins, which are
proteins attached by carbohydrates
through a process called glycosylation.
Many mammalian diseases involve
glycosylation, but its role is not clear.
Ru Chen was born in China, in a rural
Fujian province. Her grandfather, the
area’s only physician, read to her each
night from his herbal handbook. Chen
was 4 when she first heard about cancer,
after seeing a crying woman holding her
son. Ultimately, cancer also claimed her
grandfather, whom she calls “my greatest
mentor.”
Chen spent a year in a Chinese law
school and barely spoke English when
she immigrated to the United States four
years ago. Reading the newspaper voraciously
helped her to improve her oral English,
Eun Jin Hong
Samuel Landau
UCLA Law School
Andre Jordan
University of Miami, PhD in Chemistry
Matthew Lee
MD/PhD program
Nishant Kumar
Swati Kumar
although she adds that vocabulary was difficult for
her. She emphasizes how grateful she is for the help
provided by professors and students. “The one thing I
feel lucky for is that math is universal,” she adds.
With assistant professor of chemical engineering
Raymond Tu, she investigated how temperature at
the air-water interface affects kinetic differences in
the self-assembly of the Beta 9H peptide.
With chemistry professor Teresa Bandosz, she
Madeline Mineo
New York Institute of
Technology College of Osteopathy
Camillia Monestime
SUNY at Stony Brook, PhD in Biology
explored the synthesis of copper-based metallic
organic framework composites, which could improve
environmental sustainability. She had a summer
internship at Merck, related to vaccine research. As
president of City’s chapter of the American Institute
of Chemical Engineers, she helped introduce
minority middle-school students to potential opportunities in science and engineering
Jasmine Hatcher (Queens
College, B.A. in chemistry, 2009),
won a National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship to
explore whether the radioactive
element technetium-99 can be
reduced to a pure metal to
store it more safely.
Technetium-99 exists in two
forms. One, 99Tc, is the radionuclide most commonly used to image the
body in nuclear medicine scans.
But the other sits in old, potentially leaky
waste tanks as a byproduct of uranium and plutonium fission from mid-20th century nuclear
weapon manufacturing — a terrifying long-term
threat to water and the food chain.
Hatcher became interested in chemical
research at Queensborough Community College,
where she earned an associate degree in 2006.
Her mentor, associate professor Sharon LallRamnarine, arranged for her to work as her
summer research assistant at Brookhaven
National Laboratory from 2005 to 2007.
“She convinced me to go to grad school,”
Hatcher says. “Any excuse or doubts, she shot
down.”
At Queens College, Hatcher studied with
professor of chemistry and biochemistry Robert
Engel, and Brookhaven National Laboratory scientist James Wishart, who collaborates with Lall-
Sarah Najam
New York University College
of Dentistry
Ramnarine, brought her in to work as a lab tech.
After earning her bachelor’s degree, she spent
three years at Brookhaven. There, Hatcher
became proficient at purifying ionic liquids. She
worked with physical and organic chemists and a
nuclear engineer and says she “saw the need for
chemists who are really knowledgeable about
nuclear energy and how things work.”
Wishart recommended that she pursue a
doctorate under Hunter professor Lynn
Francesconi, whose research focuses on technetium. As a first-year graduate student, Hatcher
is rotating through laboratories to get a broader
frame of reference for her doctoral research.
10 CUNY 2013 AWARD RECIPIENTS
Samuel Nourieli
Rutgers University,
MS in City and Regional Planning
Amrita Persaud
Hunter College, MA in Anthropology
Joshua Pulinat
Research Study Assistant in
Psychological and Behavioral Sciences
at Memorial Sloan Kettering
Apurva Shah
Jamille Sutton
Columbia School of Journalism
Michele Williams
Summer Fellow at the Civil Rights
and Restorative Justice Clinic at
Northeastern University;
University of London, Goldsmith College,
Theater and Performance Department
Julie Zeng
Albany School of Pharmacy
It dates back to a database class with Hunter com-
Ben Hixon (Hunter College, B.A. in
computer science, 2012), now in a Univer-
puter science professor Susan Epstein. Over several
sity of Washington doctoral program, won a National
semesters, Hixon worked with her on a project related
Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to
to building a dialogue system for people who are blind
explore Open IE — open information extraction — an
and want to query the Andrew Heiskell Braille and
alternate and useful technique for searching online.
Talking Book Library in Manhattan.
“In a normal search, you’re looking for key words, but
in Open IE, you’re using facts,” he explains.
Open IE automatically pulls facts
from news stories, blogs and other
During a 2011 Research Experience for Undergraduates program, Hixon worked with Epstein’s collaborator — Rebecca Passonneau, director of
Columbia University’s Center for Computa-
text on the Internet and catalogs
tional Learning Systems. After graduation,
them in a database. For example,
he returned to work in Passonneau’s lab
he says that “if you have the sen-
and was to present a paper on this research
tence, ‘President Obama is in the
White House,’ you can extract that
Obama is the current president.” Hixon
is figuring out how to search the database.
Hixon elegantly simplifies Open IE for the general
at the June 2013 conference of the North
American Association for Computational
Linguistics.
His research with University of Washington professor Oren Etzioni, who pioneered open information ex-
public. But his research, which began when he was an
traction, has shifted from voice recognition to
undergraduate, is characterized by depth and detail.
“conversational search.”
Ekaterina Larina (Brooklyn College, B.S. in
geology, 2012), now in the college’s geology master’s
program, won a National Science Foundation Graduate
Research Fellowship to explore what caused the mass extinction of ammonites millions of years ago.
In the Maastrichtian Age — before Earth’s last mass extinction 65.5 million years ago — ammonites were as dominant in
the sea as dinosaurs were on land. The extinction of these crea-
Fazaana Ali
The City College
of New York, ’13
Louisiana State University School
of Veterinary Medicine
Monica Bal
The City College
of New York, ’13
American University
of Antigua School of Medicine
tures (think of an octopus with a shell) was most likely due to a
sustained global winter.
Well-preserved ammonite shells in the Owl Creek Formation — a section of ancient ocean floor that Larina studies in
Mississippi — could provide a richer understanding of prehistoric marine life. Larina first visited Mississippi through an
undergraduate NSF-sponsored Research Experiences for
Undergraduates.
“I’m trying to reconstruct the temperatures and to study how
changes in ammonite distribution could be related to environmental perturbations, such as climate or global sea-level
change,” she says.
Her fascination with fossils began when she
was 7, in her native Kazakhstan, when her geologist grandfather handed her a trilobite.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union,
Larina’s parents insisted she pursue a career
in management and economics. She had almost
finished a master’s degree there when an opportunity arose to study geology here. She had to start from the
beginning, taking intensive English-assecond-language courses while
Gabriela Bisono
The City College
of New York, ’13
SUNY Downstate College
of Medicine
Mohammed Bouhara
The City College
of New York, ’13
The Ohio State College
of Medicine
Miguel Briones
The City College
of New York, ’13
PhD, Psychology,
CUNY Graduate Center
Rochelle Catuira
The City College
of New York, ’13
UC Davis School of Law
Ru Chen
The City College
of New York, ’13
studying for that B.S. She
now conducts research
with her mentor,
lecturer Matthew
Garb.
Larina plans to
earn her master’s
degree in 2013 and
pursue a
doctorate with
her fellowship.
She teaches
undergraduate
geology and stratigraphy courses at the
college.
Michael Cinelli
The City College
of New York, ’13
New York College
of Osteopathic Medicine
Lucas Corcoran
The City College of New York, ’13
PhD, English,
CUNY Graduate Center
Dane Christie
Chathuranga De Silva
PhD, Chemical Engineering,
Columbia University
Moises Dominguez
Yale School of Medicine
Angela Farooqi
Frank H. Netter, MD School of
Medicine at Quinnipiac University
Philip Liu (Macaulay
Honors College at City
College, B.E. in chemical engineering, 2012)
won a National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship that
will enable him to conduct research at
the nano-level of microelectronics.
His research relates to “Moore’s
Law” — announced in 1965 by Intel
founder Gordon Moore — that predicts
that the number of transistors per
square inch on integrated circuits will
double every 18 months.
But, as microelectronics researchers
try to pack more and more circuits into
increasingly tiny packages, they’re
colliding with the peculiar physics that
take place on the nanoscale. When
things get exceedingly small, the risk of
short-circuiting soars, and the very
flow of electrons makes them too hot
to function.
Liu intends to pursue a solution.
Guided by two professors in the
chemical engineering doctoral
program at the University of Texas at
Austin, Liu will be facing several major
challenges. He hopes to create a material that will insulate electrical circuits
and conduct heat efficiently away from
Patria Gerardo
UMDNJ School
of Osteopathic Medicine
Hyeondo (Luke) Hwang
Macaulay Honors College at The
City College of New York, ’13
PhD, Chemistry,
University of Chicago
David Jacobson
Brooklyn Law School
Natalie Marte
San Juan Bautista
School of Medicine
Rodolfo Martinez
Brooklyn Law School
them — two seemingly incompatible functions that
Heidy Martinez-Avila
Howard University College
of Medicine
silicon chips to be stacked upon one another than is
have never been combined before. He hopes to do this
with a polymer composite, which would enable more
now possible. And that would allow adherence to
Moore’s Law.
“My first project is to synthesize boron nitride
Jessica Mendez
PhD, History, Columbia University
nanotubes, which are long, skinny tubes with
nanometer diameters,” Liu says
As an undergraduate, Liu had an NSF-funded
Neelu Pathayil
Macaulay Honors College at The
City College of New York, ’13
UC Hastings School of Law
Research Experiences for Undergraduates at
Columbia University. He also worked on artificial eye
research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Liu intends to work in industry after earning his
doctorate.
Christopher Parisano, a
doctoral student at the
Graduate Center, won a
Research Fellowship to study how
marginalized city residents and the
government are squaring off over archeological ruins in Lima, Peru.
Parisano (Macaulay Honors College
at Queens College, B.A. in anthropology
2008) is looking at a plan to empty out
and preserve Lima’s pre-Hispanic sites
as a tourist-oriented “heritage circuit.”
Over the past 30 years, Peru’s highland
dwellers have migrated to the city and
constructed shantytowns in the ruins.
“They come up against a rigid definition
of the sanctioned uses of archeological
sites that is connected to a rigid definition of the nation-state,” Parisano says.
Parisano first went to rural Peru as an
undergraduate in 2007, taking an
anthropological field-methods
course.
As a child, he
watched his father
and grandfather in
Willets Point, Queens
where they “worked
magic” on cars, in the
Tariq Radwan
University of Buffalo School of Medicine
and Biomedical Sciences
Mohammad Rattu
at The City College of New York, ’13
New York College of Osteopathic Medicine
Kijon Roberts
Georgetown University Law Center
Natalia Saavedra
Emory University Law School
Alen Sajan
SUNY Downstate College of Medicine
Arielle Scardino
at The City College of New York, ’13
PhD, Molecular Genetics
and Microbiology, Stony Brook University
shadow of the old Shea Stadium. Later,
also while an undergraduate, Parisano
returned to Willets Point to analyze how
Queens was being transformed by immi-
Nihir Shah
New York College of Podiatric Medicine
grants, the tenacity of local mechanics
Jorge Swett Tapia
University of Buffalo School
of Dental Medicine
“economic engine” of Queens. His work
Jan Dominik Stepinski
“When I grew large enough to peer
and the city’s attempts to develop the
ostensibly dilapidated area into the
won the 2008 Society for Urban,
National, and Transnational Anthropology Student Paper Prize.
inside a car’s engine compartment, my
father sharply announced that I would
find no future there, as he once did,”
Parisano recalls. And yet, in a roundabout way, he did find his way to the
future in Willets Point.
Sarah Ita Levitan (Brooklyn
College, B.S. in computer science,
2013) won a National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship that will help her
attempt to develop an objective, computer-based
system that would analyze children’s speech,
looking for patterns that could identify those
with autism spectrum disorders.
With an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million
Americans having an autism spectrum disorder
— and the prevalence of autism believed to affect
one in 88 children — a reliable method of diagnosis could help many get the early intervention
that is so important to their future development.
Levitan’s award will support her research in
Columbia University’s computer science
doctoral program.
“As of now, there isn’t a simple diagnostic test
for autism,” Levitan says. “It is done by a set of
subjective assessments.” Some, for example, look
at turn-taking in conversation — or echolalia,
Jonathan Voegeler
Yale Law School
Justin Joseph
CUNY Baccalaureate Degree, ’13
University of Medicine and Dentistry
of New Jersey, Masters, Oral Biology
Sally Abdelghafar
Saint John’s University
School of Education, Masters
Makeba Lavan
Graduate Center, Ph.D. English
Hogai Aryoubi
George Mason University School
of Education, Masters
Dana Manzella
University of St. Joseph School
of Pharmacy, Doctor of Pharmacy
Russell Barlow
Fulbright U.S. Student Grant 2013
(Germany)
Joseph Marletta
New York Institute of Technology,
Masters, Communications
Indra Bohara
Baruch College, Masters,
Public Administration
Immacolata Mazzone
CUNY Graduate Center, Masters,
Liberal Arts
Dexter Corbin
City College, Masters,
Landscape Architecture
Nicolas Montano
Marshall Scholarship, 2013
Harvard Latino Leadership Initiative, 2012
Adam Goodkind
Graduate Center,
Masters, Linguistics
Florina Petcu
East Bay State University, Masters,
Counseling Psychology
Rabiah Gul
University of Dayton School of Law
James Michael Prettyman
Harvard Divinity School, Masters
where children repeat things they have heard
instead of engaging in conversation.
During high school and college, Levitan volunteered and then worked with children with
autism at the Hebrew Academy for Special Children in Brooklyn. She observed that early detection “could make a world of difference.” At Brooklyn College, she worked on a computational biology research project with mentor
Dina Sokol, an associate professor of computer
and information science.
“She studies tandem repeats
in DNA, which are used to
diagnose diseases and in
human identity testing,”
Levitan says.
At Sokol’s suggestion,
Levitan applied for a Distributed
Research Experiences for Undergraduates award from the Computer Research
Association’s Committee on the Status of
Women in Computing Research. That led
Arielle Rothenberg
School of Visual Arts,
Art Therapy Program
Jon Soto
Hunter College School of Education,
Masters, Rehabilitation Counseling
Joshua Trinidad
Fulbright English Teaching
Assistantship 2013 (Colombia)
Andrew Ziegler
Brooklyn College, Masters, English
to spending the summer after her junior
year conducting research in the laboratory
of Julia Hirschberg, director of Columbia’s
Spoken Language Processing
Group.
It sounds like science
fiction: The U.S. Army
charging across the
battlefield, wearing body armor
that makes it invisible to the enemy.
Yet Aleksey Ruditskiy says that it
might be possible with the right
assembly of nanocrystals and the
presence of an electrical field.
“We all like science fiction around
here,” says Ruditskiy (Macaulay
Honors College at City College of
New York, B.E. in chemical engineering, 2012), who is working
toward a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He adds with a laugh, “It’s
how we get our ideas.”
Ruditskiy will pursue
his research, which
also has what he calls
“more mundane
applications, like seals
for doors on a ship that
can compress and decompress by flipping a switch,” with a
2013 National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship. He is
now studying in the laboratory of
professor Younan Xia, the Brock
Family Chair and Georgia Research
Alliance Eminent Scholar in
Nanomedicine.
Born in Minsk, Belarus, he and his
family moved to New York City as
refugees in 2002, when he was 11.
“My mother and father were both
engineers who got degrees in the
Soviet Union,” he says. “I showed
interest in encyclopedias, so they
bought them, and I read them.”
At City College, he worked with
teachers like associate professor
Ilona Kretzschmar, who supervised
his work on the electromagnetic
assembly of Janus particles for nearly
four years.
Evonne Zitouni
CUNY Graduate Center, Masters, Liberal Arts
Mircea Alexandru Comanescu
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, ’13
Alexander Joseph Memorial Award, 2013
Sally Abdelghafar
New York City Teaching Fellowship, 2013
Mircea Alexandru Comanescu
Graduate Center, Criminal Justice
Doctoral Program,
Forensic Science Specialization
Rosmarin Belliard
New York City Urban Fellows, 2013
Carlene Bobb
Signature Role Model Program, 2013
Joel Cabrera
Arizona State University, M.A.
Anjelica Camacho
JENESYS 2.0 and Youth Exchange Program
with North America, 2013
Maxi Cruz
JENESYS 2.0 and Youth Exchange Program
with North America, 2013
John Spencer Cusick
New York City Urban Fellowship, 2013
Rachelle Theresa Fernandez
Columbia University, School of Social Work
For Jamar Whaley (Queens College, B.A. 2011), it has been a long, difficult climb. But this year, he won a
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a federal Fulbright Fellowship. In 2009, he was awarded a federal
Goldwater Scholarship.
Here are some of the challenges he has faced:
Years ago, feeling unprepared, Whaley quit Styuvesant High School. Later, without a GED, he talked his way into a technical position that led to middle management. He had to take a CUNY admissions test to get into Queens. He rescued a
crack-addicted friend. Recently, in his 30s, he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, had surgery, and the prognosis is
good.
He plans to seek admission to a neuroscience doctoral program. But first he will study at the internationally known
Beijing addiction clinic run by Ran Tao, noted for his work on Internet addiction disorder.
The United States is said to rank second behind China in the number of individuals whose lives are severely affected
by Internet addiction. Whaley’s prospective doctoral work would involve functional magnetic resonance imaging to
compare how Internet addicts’ brains function normally and when encountering addictive triggers.
Whaley originally planned on clinical psychology, but an experimental methods class led him into research in associate professor
Robert Ranaldi’s laboratory. He also decided to become a role model for minority students in his field.
Whaley’s great-grandmother, Elizabeth, now 91, raised him from infancy in Flushing, and he says he wants to help others the way
she helped him.
“I want to make sure others can have a life and excel after they have underachieved,” he says.
To win a 2013 National
Science Foundation
Graduate Research
Fellowship, Jan Stepinski
(Macaulay Honors College at City
College, B.E. in environmental engineering,
2013) proposed using the data-crunching,
mathematical process of inversion to identify
components in the chaotic stream of information detected by atmospheric sensors.
At City College, his related core undergraduate research was with Alexander Gilerson, an
associate professor of electrical engineering,
who uses remote sensing to evaluate and
predict ocean health.
Stepinski, CCNY’s 2013 valedictorian, will
attend the Stanford Institute for Computational
and Mathematical Engineering in the fall.
During his work at Stanford while an undergraduate, Peter Kitanidis, a professor of civil
and environmental engineering, asked him to
employ inversion to reveal “how liquids flow
through aquifers. This helps scientists to
understand the repair of aquifers from
fracking and oil drilling.”
Inversion is also useful for understanding
atmospheric pollutants. Despite the premise of the NSF award,
Stepinski has shifted the likely focus of his
Lauren Alexandra Fischer
Presidential Management Fellowship, 2013
Kamar-Jay Foster
Middlebury College, The French School
Daniel Golebiewski
Columbia University in the City of New York,
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences,
M.A. in Human Rights Studies
Atenedoro Gonzalez
Saint John’s University, College of Law, JD
Daniel B. Grogul
Touro Law School, Law School, JD
Daniel B. Grogul
Uniformed Fire Officers
Association Award, 2013
doctoral research, which the NSF grant allows.
He has been in contact with a Stanford electrical
engineering professor who works with radar.
Although he began his college career more
Rabiah Gul
Thomas W. Smith Fellowship, 2012
interested in the humanities and economics,
he now says, “I think mathematics in its purest
form is an approximation of the world.”
Khrys-Ann Monique Josephs
Dean Scholarship from Boston College —
Lynch School of Education, 2013
Jamila Khan
CUNY Women's Public Service
Internship Program, 2012
Kemar McIntosh
Stony Brook University — SUNY,
Graduate School
Born in Brooklyn, Stepinski says he “spent
most of my youth upstate in the forest.”
At City College, Stepinski also won the
Belden Medal for Advanced Calculus, the Post
Scholarship from the Society of American Military Engineers and the Peggy Cornell Benline
Scholarship from the Municipal Engineers of
the City of New York, all awarded in 2012. He
studied at the Frankfurt School of Finance &
Management during the summer of 2011.
Maria Louisa Strangas, a
Graduate Center doctoral
student, has won a National Science
Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and is heading to the Brazilian forests
to study how temperature patterns have
affected the evolution of some rare lizards.
Strangas (University of Rochester, B.S.
in ecology and evolutionary biology, 2010)
intends to look for Gymnophthalmid
lizards found only on certain mountains.
Strangas adds that she chose to study
lizards because they are very vulnerable to
climate change and don’t move far during
their lifetimes. By sampling particular
populations, she will get information about
the climatic histories of their locations.
She says she will, in part, look at
“patterns to try to identify regions of the
forest that might harbor the species most
vulnerable to future climate change.” Her
work grows out of her curiosity about the
process of diversification in the
Atlantic forest of Brazil, which
has received far less attention than the country’s
Amazon forest.
As an undergraduate,
she worked on research
Melanie P. Monzon
Alex Smith Award for Excellence
in Criminology, Interdisciplinary Studies
Award for Academic Excellence, 2013
Shante Morales
2012 Women’s Forum
Education Fund Scholarship, 2012
Abby Lynn Mulay
Long Island University,
Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program
Danielle Palumbo
John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
Forensic Psychology M.A.
Nayanny Yarinet Bello Paniagua
Washington DC internship
with the Rogowsky program, 2013
Anne Scheiber Memorial Award,
Distinguished Service Award, 2013
Karolina Przegienda
Adler School of Professional Psychology,
Psy.D in Clinical Psychology
projects documenting the
composition of forests near
Rochester. She also worked with loggerhead sea turtles through ARCHELON, the
Sea Turtle Conservation Society of Greece.
After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in
2010, Strangas went to work as a technician in the laboratory of City College assistant professor Ana Carnaval before
Ratko Rakocevic
Scholar-athlete, 2013
deciding to pursue a doctorate. Carnaval
Arlety Rosario
Hunter College, MSW
ical processes. Queens’ Carnaval
studies spatial patterns of biodiversity and
their underlying evolutionary and ecologcontinues to be her Ph.D. mentor.
Strangas also has taught fifth- and sixthgraders science at an after-school program
in Queens.
19
Tayyaba Toseef, a
master’s student
at Hunter
College, has a National
Science Foundation Fellowship to pursue research that
could point the way toward therapies that may
reverse the degenerative process in multiple
sclerosis patients and regrow the myelin that
their central nervous systems have lost.
MS is a disease in which the protective
myelin sheath surrounding nerves is
destroyed. This severely limits nerve function
and causes cognitive and motor defects.
Myelin is like the insulation surrounding electric wires: If it’s destroyed, the wires can’t
function properly.
Toseef’s research proposal aims for a better
understanding of how oligodendrocytes cells
that myelinate neurons (that is, put the insulation on nerves) in the central nervous
system — function over the course of brain
development. Her goal is to knock out a key
gene that governs formation of oligodendrocytes and then compare myelination in
normal mice and those missing the gene.
Toseef is working under the mentorship of
Hunter assistant professor of biological
sciences Carmen Melendez-Vasquez. “If we
can identify the molecular mechanisms
involved in nerve myelination, we can manipulate them to occur in adulthood and induce
remyelination in conditions where myelin is
depleted,” she says.
Toseef began elementary school in her
Malgorzata Renata Sekowska
Anthony and Josephine Chmura Memorial
Scholarship, 2012
Chassitty N. Whitman
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Ph.D.
— Clinical Psychology with full funding
Naithram “Nate” Singh
INTERPOLWashington, D.C., Internship, 2013
Thomas Scot Wolinetz
Hofstra University School of Law,
Maurice A. Deane School of Law, JD
her bachelor’s degree in biology from
Folashade S. Alawiye
New York City College of Technology,’13
National Science Foundation Research
Experiences for Undergraduates Award
enter a Ph.D. program to pursue a career in
Ryan L. Spiker
Presidential Management Fellowship, 2013
Arianne Vargas
at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, ’13
City College, Computer science
native Pakistan and then in Saudi Arabia. Her
family moved to Delaware when she was in
fifth grade, and she lived there until earning
Delaware State University in 2011.
Toseef has previously worked on two projects studying brain development. She hopes to
academic research. In addition to lab and
coursework, she has conducted classroom
demonstrations of neuroscience topics for
fifth-graders in Harlem Central Middle
School.
Jake V. Vaynshteyn, City
College, B.E., 2009, will use his
Research Fellowship to refine his undergraduate research of the brain’s cerebral
cortex as a first-year doctoral student at
Albert Einstein College of Medicine of
Yeshiva University.
Jacqueline Eleanor Anscombe
New York City College of Technology, ’13
Scholarship Award for Broadway Sound
Master Classes, 2013
Jeane Ivy Cruz
C.A.R.E. Community Service Award in
memory of Professor Felice A. Chiaperini
Kristen Battaglia
Bebe and Louise Hoffman Award
for Creative Exploration of Food and Arts
Winner, Junior Pastry Chef Challenge,
U.S. Pastry Competition
Raymond Garcia
The Charles Mauro Award
The cerebral cortex, the outermost layer
of neural tissue on the brain, plays a modulatory role in memory, perception, atten-
Erica Dee Breiner
Made In NY (MINY) Scholarship, 2013
tion, thought, language and consciousness.
It may represent the pinnacle of engineering.
Vaynshteyn was born in the Soviet Union
Emilie Chinchilla
Master of Science in Sustainability
City College of NY
Caroline Godoy
Société Culinaire Philanthropique Award for
Outstanding Potential in Pastry Arts
Lorena M. Gomez
Grand Central Partnership —
Grand Gourmet Market
to artist parents who left because
they were not willing to
paint regime propaganda. They moved to
France and Utah
before settling in New
York as their son
entered junior high school.
Vaynshteyn later attended
Queens College as a mathematics major and
then switched to City as his interest in
biomedical engineering grew.
About City and the Grove School of Engineering, he says: “They craft your mind to
solve problems.”
For two years after graduation, Vaynshteyn
was a technician at Rockefeller University
and began asking the kinds of questions that
neuroscientists pose regarding the brain.
Using his engineering background, though,
he was able to help a postdoctoral student
develop an animal testing system in a molecular genetics laboratory.
While at Queens, Vaynshteyn met and
ultimately married Wendy Sanchez, who
had a dual major in chemistry and computer
science and sought to combine her interests
in biomedical engineering. She also
switched to the Grove School, and they
worked on his senior project together. She
earned her B.E. degree the year after he did,
2010. The couple, who have two sons, aged 3
and 19 months, are at Einstein.
Lukman Solola, Brooklyn
College, B.S. in chemistry,
2012, now in a chemistry doctoral
program at the University of Pennsylvania
— won a National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship to help him
search for an environmentally friendly way
to extract rare-earth metals.
Rare-earth metals — including dysprosium, europium, neodymium, terbium and
yttrium — are in critically short supply.
They are needed, though, to produce cellphones, electronic equipment and cleanenergy products such as wind turbines,
electric vehicles, photovoltaic thin-film
solar cells and fluorescent lights.
Despite the term “rare earth,” these and
similar metallic elements are not actually
rare. They are, though, difficult to extract
from the ores than contain them. China has
built a near-monopoly with an extraction
process that begins with rocks, but then uses
chemicals that are not environmentally
friendly. Solola is looking for an alternative,
cleaner way to do this. In the United States,
he emphasizes, “we have a vibrant, environmentally friendly policy.”
In his laboratory, he emphasizes, he deals
with reagents and compounds rather
than rocks. His mentor is Eric J.
Schelter, an assistant
professor of inorganic and
materials chemistry.
Solola was born in
Nigeria and moved to
Brooklyn about six years ago,
after finishing high school. In the
summer of 2011, as an undergraduate, he
interned at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The summer before he worked on on
research on breast cancer vaccines at Albert
Einstein College of Medicine.
It was a high school chemistry teacher
who motivated Solola to pursue chemistry.
Now he volunteers at a Philadelphia high
school, helping to teach 11th- and 12thgrade chemistry.
Joseph M. Gordon
New York City College
of Technology, ’13
Partridge Invitation Scholarship
Foundation Eddie Lane Award
Gloria M. Granthe
Elizabeth Vicksell Award, 2013
Luciane Grillo
Eddie Bergman Award
Melissa Mack
Fellowship to attend Master's
program in Mathematics
Teacher Education
St. John’s University.
Randa Marie
Leo F. Caproni Global Citizen Award
Sandy J. Marin
The International Chefs Association, Big Apple Chapter Award
Claudia Sanchez
Société Culinaire Philanthropique
Award for Outstanding
Potential in Culinary Arts
Imani J. Wood
The Union Square Hospitality
Group Award
Karmen Yu
PhD program in Math Education,
Montclair State University.
Tom Sander
Debragga & Spitler Award
Carlos E. Santiago
Bear Dallis Associates Award
for potential in Special Events
Planning Management
Adolfo A Seda
Frederick Wildman & Sons,
LTD Outstanding Potential in the
Wine Industry Award, 2013
Roopesh Seenarine
The Betsy Schaible Travel Award
Valentina Stanovova
Harvard University
Graduate School of Design Career
Discovery Program
Hong Jie Su
The Halton E. Merrill Award
Yi Ming Yu
CCNY’s Master's program
in Pure Mathematics
Dmitriy Zemel
Masters of Architecture
(M.ARCH), Pratt Institute
Stephanie Jean-Baptiste
Queens College, ’13
Mellon Mays
Undergraduate Fellowship
Michelle Chan
Jeannette K. Watson
Summer Fellowship
Tara Gildea
Beinecke Brothers
Memorial Scholarship
Tracy Leong
Mellon Mays
Undergraduate Fellowship
Juan Mejia
New York City College of
Technology, ’13
CCNY’s Master’s program
in Computer Science
Glenroy A. Moore
Francis Lorenzini Cuisine
and Culture Award
Diandra Tobon
Award for Outstanding Potential in
Pastry Arts
Juan Mejia
Research Experiences for
Undergraduates Award
Carlos J. Morocho
Award for Outstanding Potential in
Culinary Arts
Douglas John Triglianos
New York Law School, JD/MBA
Clark B. Monzon
The International Chefs Association, Big Apple Chapter Award
Emily Rodriguez
The American Institute
of Wine & Food
William A. Leverett
Jeannette K. Watson
Summer Fellowship
Madeline T. Yap
Julio Viana
Master in Civil Engineering/
Construction Management
Concordia University,
Montreal, Quebec Canada

uate Research Fellowships are among the

Transcription

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