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2009 Outstanding Graduates Overcame
Challenges, Worked with Nobel Prize Laureates

Christine Clark | June 15, 2009

One student whose parents lived in federal public housing projects will go to graduate school at Harvard to study urban planning and design. Another emigrated from Iran just six years ago and did research in physiology and medicine in the lab of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. A third student, a great-great-great niece of American naturalist John Muir, is graduating from John Muir College. These students and winners of the second annual Outstanding Senior and an Outstanding Graduate Student award are among an impressive roster of fascinating graduates who earned their diplomas this weekend.

Shae Lynn Whitney Zastrow accepted the Outstanding Senior Award at the All Campus Graduation Celebration Friday. Zastrow graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt College and has been an intern for the Oasis Language Writing Program, where she has shown a genuine dedication to improving the language skills of English as a Second Language (ESL) students. A descendant of the Hupa tribe of northern California, Zastrow has been a prominent advocate of Native American issues.  She re-founded the Native American Students Alliance and has tutored middle and high school students through the Student Education Advancement program.

Zastrow is a member of the Native American Research Center for Health and has done research though the California Native American Directed Undergraduate Research Grant. Her senior honor’s research thesis was on the development of infant bonobos.

She has a deep interest in the arts and has performed for seven quarters with the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus as a soprano singer.

Preston Sharp, winner of the Outstanding Graduate Student award, graduated from the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies with a degree focused on management and economics in Latin America. Sharp developed a passion for international development while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Samoa from 2003 to 2005.

Sharp has been working on the Baja Project, where he traveled to El Barril, Baja California, Mexico, four weeks a year during school breaks to work with the community.

Photo of Preston Sharp
Preston Sharp

In addition, Sharp has been dedicated to raising awareness about the environment and supporting UC San Diego’s effort to become one of the greenest universities in the nation. Sharp helped develop the Sustainability Walk, a tour in which guests learn about UC San Diego’s sustainability achievements. He initiated a sustainability ideas contest that resulted in over 40 submissions and has become an annual event. He’s also helped coordinate campus events on fair trade, corporate social responsibility and organic farming. Upon graduation, Sharp will work with a small non-profit that facilitates investment in social entrepreneurs while employing impact metrics and evaluation tools that he developed as a graduate student.

Earl Warren College Logo

Whitney Brooks arrived as a transfer student at UC San Diego in 2008 after delaying her college career to care for her critically ill mother and younger sister. After her mother passed away, Brooks attended San Diego City College before transferring to Earl Warren College. Since both of her parents grew up in federal public housing developments, Brooks was drawn to study ways to improve city planning.

Brooks manages to work 25 hours a week for the UC San Diego Alumni Association as an alumni discovery ambassador and has a stellar academic record. As part of the Urban Studies and Planning program senior research class, Brooks volunteered to be the leader for her research group and served as the contact between her group and their off-campus mentor, the Center on Policy Initiatives. Brooks recently finished her senior honors research thesis on economic development and professional sports stadiums.

Brooks also is a member of the Big Brother and Big Sister program where she mentors at-risk students in San Diego and she volunteers at the San Diego Hospice. Brooks will attend Harvard’s department of urban studies planning and design, where she will study for a master’s degree. After she graduates she wants to work for the private sector on international development in Latin America and Asia.  

Muir College Logo

Amanda Muir is a great-great-great niece of American naturalist John Muir and is graduating this year from Muir College. Muir is heavily involved in campus activities at Muir, was on the Muir Residential Council for two years, acted as the social chair, was a Resident Advisor for Muir College her junior year and was a college historian. “I have always been one to be actively involved in both school and outside organizations,” she said. “But I really began to take pride in seeing how Muir College affected the students around me. While going to school at a college named for one of my ancestors has been fantastic, I know that it has meant even more for my grandparents and my family.”

Muir has worked at the “Middle of Muir” convenience store during her sophomore year and she’s participated in the college’s cake-cutting ceremony on John Muir’s birthday for the past four years.

Photo of Pouya Jamshidi
Pouya Jamshidi

Pouya Jamshidi was born in Iran and moved to the United States six years ago.  The Earl Warren College senior arrived at UC San Diego three years ago as a transfer student from Santa Monica College. Since attending UC San Diego, she he has earned a Howard Hughes Medical Institute summer research scholarship, the Warren College Outstanding Undergraduate Research scholarship, the Alumni Association’s Vickerman Munoz Family Outstanding Leadership Award and an Iranian-American scholarship.

Jamshidi is UC San Diego’s only undergraduate to take part in the Exceptional Research Opportunity program offered by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. As a result, he spent last summer at Columbia University working in the lab of Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize laureate in physiology and medicine. Jamshidi also presented the results of his research in Kandel’s lab in Washington D.C. in May 2009. Last year, he was awarded the Undergraduate Research Scholarship and, this year, for the second consecutive year, he was awarded the Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Scholarship.

At UC San Diego, Jamshidi was mentored by renowned neuroscientist Mark Tuszynski through a faculty mentoring program. Undergraduates typically complete short-term projects in professors’ labs, but Jamshidi worked in Tuszynski’s lab for three years. Jamshidi was co-author with his mentor on a recent publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study documented for the first time the regeneration of a critical type of nerve fiber that travels between the brain and the spinal cord and which is required for voluntary movement.

Jamshidi recently accepted an offer in the department of neurobiology to join the lab of Jill and Stefan Leutgeb as a research assistant and plans to apply for the combined M.D./Ph.D program. Jamshidi will continue to do neuroscience research while his application is under review for admission.

Erika Kociolek
Erika Kociolek

Erika Kociolek has been a driving force on several campus sustainability projects and gave a student presentation at the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo last year in Boston, one of the biggest green building conferences in the world. The international studies major also will be at the UC/CSU/CCC Sustainability Conference in Santa Barbara June 21-24, where she will accept the Best Practices Award for Student Energy Efficiency.

Kociolek is one of only a handful of people at UC San Diego who is a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) accredited professional, and is playing a leadership role in several of the campus’ sustainability efforts. The Green Campus and Environment Sustainability Initiative intern serves as a student representative on the UC San Diego Climate Solutions Working Group and the Advisory Committee on Sustainability.

Kociolek minored in environmental studies and hopes to work in the “green” job sector after she graduates. “I think it is a really exciting field and it’s changing rapidly every day,” she said. “I am intrigued by the new advances in technology and innovative people in the profession.”

Photo of Jessica Wall
Jessica Wall

Jessica Wall has been one of UC San Diego’s most dedicated students for raising awareness about the environmental sustainability. You can’t go to a green event on the UC San Diego campus and not find the Environmental Systems major. She is seemingly omnipresent at tree plantings, beach clean-ups and campus energy conservation competitions. She is a member of many organizations that help promote sustainability, including One Earth One Justice, the Social and Environmental Sustainability Committee, the Compost Team and the Association of Environmental Professionals. Wall is dedicated to living a sustainable lifestyle on a day-to-day basis. “I no longer buy plastic water bottles and I reuse an aluminum bottle instead,” she said. “I recycle religiously and try to conserve energy whenever I can by doing things like switching all my bulbs out to compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). I try to incorporate sustainability into all of my actions and remember that I can make a difference in helping save the environment.”

Photo of Benjamin Duff
Benjamin Duff

Benjamin Duff graduated with a degree in human development from Thurgood Marshall College. Following graduation he will be attending the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia to pursue a career as a Marine officer and, eventually, continue to medical school following the completion of his service.

“Growing up in a family with a long tradition of service in the Marine Corps, I feel being a part of that legacy was something that was very important to me from an early age,” Duff said. “The training I’ll be receiving as part of my service will provide me with an opportunity to develop my leadership skills and help prepare me for graduate school.”

Duff was involved in the UC San Diego chapter of the Flying Samaritans, a student-run organization that operates a free clinic just south of Ensenada, Mexico. He worked as a four-year board member and was president of the group this year. Duff was also a Marshall Resident Advisor from 2007 to 2009.

Revelle College Logo

Marissa Caballes is passionate about helping victims of AIDS. She helped plan World AIDS Day and she brought the chapter of FACE AIDS to UC San Diego for the first time.“I think that it is a very important crisis that our generation has to confront,” she said. “It is no longer a new virus anymore, as it was in the 1980's when the epidemic first appeared, so sometimes people forget that it is still hurting our population.” She’s a member of the Alternative Breaks program at UC San Diego and will travel to Tanzania to help patients with AIDS this summer by assisting in the construction of a primary school in efforts to sustain education for the children of neighboring villages. She is in the process of establishing the student organization, GROWN, a group designed to resolve both local and global hunger issues. “This student movement appealed to me in that it was very proactive and inspirational,” she said.

The Revelle College senior has worked as a research assistant at the Scripps Research Institute and at the Institute for Childhood and Neglected Diseases, where she has investigated the molecular basis of deafness since her sophomore year. In addition, Caballes volunteered at the VA Medical Center and is working as a biology teaching assistant studying the biological markers that indicate Parkinson's disease in an effort to find the pathogenesis of the degenerative disease. For more information please visit faceaids.org.

Revelle College Logo

Sarah Chang, a UC San Diego biology and cell biology major, works hard to help others in need. In the wake of the 2007 wildfires, Chang, the Associated Students’ vice president of finance and resources, arranged the logistics for the Oct. 30 blood drive on campus. Chang and fellow student foundation member Emma Sandoe also organized a donation drive for shelters for fire victims. In two days, they managed to collect six carloads of goods.

The Revelle College senior is currently president of the Student Foundation. Last year, Chang and other members of the Student Foundation raised a total of $18,644 for the Senior Class Gift, which was used to award 2008 scholarships to continuing students.  "The Student Foundation has helped solidify in me a passion for philanthropy and continually opens my eyes to the joys of giving back, even if all you have to offer is time," said Chang.

She’s helped establish traditions at UC San Diego by serving as a student representative on the All Campus Graduation Celebration, Senior Week and Welcome Week convocation committees.

Chang will pursue a career in medicine and has always known that her prime interest would be working with children in underserved areas. Chang has worked as a research assistant in the James W. Posakony Lab in biology and has volunteered in the Joseph G. Gleeson Lab. She’s also served as a teaching assistant for Dr. Raffi V. Aorian and Dr. Douglass J. Forbes.

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John Kucharski and Rhiannon Kucharski husband and wife, will both graduate together from the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS). The couple will receive master’s degrees in Pacific international affairs with a focus in international economics. “John and I both wanted to return to graduate school at the same time,” Rhiannon said.  “But we staggered our entrance years so that I could continue to work full time during John's first year, and so he could work during my second year.” Although it was difficult for Rhiannon to leave a well-paying job in the private sector to go back to graduate school, she said it was worth it because she’s excited to transition into a career in service.

The couple said they chose IR/PS because it is a highly-ranked professional program with a great reputation and alumni network. “It brings together the best aspects of an MBA with international policy, development and economics,” she said.  “Also, John and I were both very impressed with the faculty at IR/PS.” The couple is moving to Los Angeles to work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Rhiannon’s position is in social sciences as study manager/lead planner and John's is in regional economics.

Skaggs Logo

Kay Nguyen, Lannie Duong and Vy Tran graduated from Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

The three Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) students from the Skaggs recently returned from a fourth-year clinical rotation in Vietnam. Kay Nguyen, Lannie Duong and Vy Tran are the first students to complete their elective pharmacy advance practice experience abroad.

The students were hosted by the University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – among the country’s top tier universities of pharmacy and medicine.

Kay relished the opportunity to understand more about the healthcare situation in the country where she was born.  All three speak Vietnamese, so they were able to truly immerse themselves in the experience.

Photo of Derek Lomas
Derek Lomas

Derek Lomas is graduating from UC San Diego, having worked as a scientist and artist while pursuing his Master of Fine Arts from the department of visual arts. As a graduate student, he taught a web-based technology class in 2008 – not in front of the classroom, but from his remote desktop in Mumbai, India. Lomas also co-founded Playpower.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to use a $12 computer as a platform to bring computer-aided learning to millions of children in India, Brazil, Ghana and other developing countries. Lomas got the idea to develop Playpower during his summer internship in 2007 with Qualcomm, Inc., in Mumbai, India, where he saw $12 computers being sold in marketplaces. 

He also directed the Social Movement Laboratory at the California Institute of Telecommunications and Technology (Calit2) which is a hybrid arts laboratory researching the aesthetics and dynamics of social activity. In the summer of 2008, Lomas was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during theInternational Development Design Summit.  He received his undergraduate degree in cognitive science from Yale University in 2003. This fall, Lomas will study at Carnegie Mellon University in the doctoral program for human computer interaction in the department of computer science.

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