Monterey Bay: The Magazine of CSU Monterey Bay Vol. 6 no. 2 | Page 9

D Four outstanding student researchers land prestigious fellowships to top-tier doctoral programs By James Tinney ILLUSTRATIONS BY LOGAN PARSONS r. William Head says Isael Rubio used to be one of his “shoelace kids,” so shy that he’d talk to you while looking at the floor. Now, the Alisal High graduate and first-generation college student is a recipient of one of the nation’s most prestigious fellowships and is conducting his Ph.D. research in the plant pathology lab at the University of Wisconsin, one of the nation’s leading research institutions. Such are the transformations that happen through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Center at Cal State Monterey Bay. As UROC’s director, Head oversees a program that has had remarkable success in advancing young researchers to the first rank of U.S. academia. In 2012, four CSUMB undergraduate students received fellowships from the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program. In addition to Rubio, Kevin Johnson, Alexandra Davis, and Eric Ross each were awarded $90,000 for graduate studies over three years. “I just thought that we are from a small school, little CSUMB. I had the feeling that people from more prestigious schools would be the most likely ones to get the scholarships,” Rubio said. But with UROC support, he moved forward. “The more I got into it, I saw that I did have a lot of good research experience that would help me.” For outstanding students in the sciences, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships are the brass ring. The four CSUMB students were among roughly 2,000 winners (from about 12,000 applicants) of the nation’s oldest fellowship program directly supporting graduate students in science, technology, math and engineering fields. Past recipients include U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Google founder Sergey Brin, Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt, and a number of Nobel Prize winners. The awards place Cal State Monterey Bay in select company. No other CSU campus had as many recipients, and CSUMB’s total matches such major state research institutions as the University of Utah, the University of Tennessee, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Oregon. All those universities have far larger enrollments than Cal State Monterey Bay. As an undergraduate, Rubio conducted research with Dr. Carolee Bull at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Research Service in Salinas, investigating bacterial plant pathology. Johnson, mentored by Cal State Monterey Bay’s Dr. Aparna Sreenivasan, researched freshwater cyanobacterial algal blooms in the Monterey Bay area. Davis studied seafloor mapping with Cal State Monterey Bay’s Dr. Rikk Kvitek and invasive lionfish at the Perry Institute for Marine Science in the Bahamas under the mentorship of Oregon State University’s Dr. Mark Hixon. Ross, mentored by Cal State Monterey Bay’s Dr. Susan Alexander and UC Davis’