October 13, 2003

Media Contact: Michael Dabney, (858) 822-3432

Three University of California, San Diego students – Carla Cervantes, Esther Gurrola and Fabiola Navarro – received individual science-related honors at undergraduate research conferences earlier this year. The students are all members of UCSD’s California Alliance for Minority Participation in Science, Engineering and Mathematics (CAMP) program, a unit of the university’s Academic Enrichment Programs (AEP), that encourages students ethnically underrepresented in higher education to pursue graduate degrees and careers in science, engineering and mathematics.

Cervantes, a biochemistry major, received a Special Merit for Research award at CAMP’s fifth Statewide Undergraduate Research Symposium at UC Irvine for her scientific poster presentation titled, Biosynthetic Diversity in Terpene Cyclases. Her presentation, based on research with her faculty mentor, Professor Joseph Noel, Ph.D., of UCSD’s Chemistry and Biochemistry Department and The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, examined the enzymatic synthesis of plant metabolites, and of potential pharmaceutical and pharmacological application of a complex class of enzymes known as terpene cyclases.

Cervantes, who transferred to UCSD from Southwestern Community College was also a scholar in the McNair Scholar Program, another AEP initiative, and has been involved in other undergraduate research programs while at UCSD, including the Summer Training Academy for Research in the Sciences (STARS) and the Minority Access to Science, Engineering and Math Programs (MASEM). She graduated from UCSD this summer and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry at the university.

Esther Gurrola, a bioengineering major, was also honored at the CAMP Symposium as CAMP’s Outstanding Peer Mentor at UCSD. The award recognizes undergraduates in the organization’s participating campuses who serve as mentors and role models for other students. In addition to mentoring, Gurrola, a Phi Beta Kappa student, has also helped recruit students for UCSD’s CAMP Program and has been active in the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (S.H.P.E.) at the university.

Computer engineering student Fabiola Navarro received third-place honors for her oral scientific presentation titled, Development of a New Meteor Radar for Measuring Upper Atmosphere Winds at the Universidad Metropolitana (UMET) conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The conference was co-sponsored by the Minority Institutions of Excellence (MIE) Project. Navarro, who transferred to UCSD from Napa Valley College (Napa, CA), conducted her research under the Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) program at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at Colorado University, Boulder. For this work, she was also selected as a finalist in the 2003 Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) NTCC Technical Paper Competition held in New Orleans in January of this year.

Other UCSD-CAMP undergraduates who conducted research presentations at the CAMP Symposium were: Sotero Alvarado, Larry Hernandez, and Alisi Tulua-Tata. Alvarado’s presentation was titled, Ideal Quotients and a Combinatorial Conjecture (Mentor: Nolan Wallach, Ph.D.). Hernandez’s presentation was titled, Quantifying Atmospheric Nitrate Deposition Using Total Oxygen Isotope Analysis (Mentor: Mark Thiemens, Ph.D.). Tulua-Tata’s presentation was titled, B-type Natriuretic Peptide as an Indicator of Postoperative Complications in Cardiac Surgery Patients (Mentor: Alan Maisel, M.D.). Also attending the conference were UCSD-CAMP students, Tiffany Sims and Veronica Lopez.

The CAMP Statewide Undergraduate Research Symposium is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the University of California, and the UC Regents. CAMP is one of 30 Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation funded in the U.S. by NSF. In addition to UCSD, other UC campuses participating in CAMP are: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and UC Santa Barbara.

The CAMP program at UCSD is administered by Academic Enrichment Programs (AEP), a unit of Student Affairs under Vice Chancellor Joseph Watson.

For more information on the CAMP program at UCSD, visit the AEP website at http://aep.ucsd.edu.