The RUA Community Engagement Board
The Community Engagement Board (CEB) will guide the Research University Alliance efforts to build community among the AGEP Alliance graduate students, postdocs, new faculty and AGEP alumni. To do so, the CEB will use their personal experiences, networks and real-time knowledge of social media to develop and implement tools that will foster community within the Alliance and beyond, and that will amplify the impact and sustainability of the Alliance model.
Cody Aldaz
Cody received his Bachelors of Science in Chemistry at the University of New Mexico, where he did undergraduate research in the Maximizing Access to Research Careers program. He then received a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Michigan where he was a DOE Science Graduate Student Fellow and participated in the AGEP California Research Alliance. He is now a Stanford Science Fellow where he is focusing on reaction discovery and synthesis planning in photochemistry.
Nick Geiser
Nick is a PhD candidate in theoretical physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He works in string theory and uses mathematics to solve problems in quantum gravity. Outside of research, he works with a variety of organizations to support under-represented minority groups in STEM fields.
Melissa Ramirez
Melissa was born in Los Angeles, CA and raised in Pasadena, CA as part of a Mexican American family. She is a first-generation college student and obtained her BA in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Thereafter, Melissa attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she received a PhD in chemistry in 2021. Melissa will be joining the laboratory of Professor Brian Stoltz as a Caltech Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the summer of 2021 and looks forward to contributing to the RUA as part of the Community Engagement Board.
Yeimy Rivera
Yeimy received her PhD at the University of Michigan in solar and heliospheric physics. Presently, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian working as part of the Parker Solar Probe SWEAP team. Her postdoctoral research pertains to investigating the ion and elemental composition of the solar wind to understand where and how it emerges from the Sun.
Natalie Nicole Sanchez
Natalie Nicole Sanchez started her astronomy career at Santa Monica Community College and obtained her BS in Physics at Cal Poly Pomona. Nicole completed her MA in Physics as part of the Fisk-Vanderbilt Masters-to-PhD Bridge Program and is currently a NASA FINESST PhD candidate at the University of Washington. She will defend her PhD summer 2022 and begin a joint postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech and Carnegie Observatories in September 2022. Her research focuses on theoretical astrophysics and she uses cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of Milky Way-size galaxies to understand the relationship between supermassive black holes and the gaseous halo that surrounds a galaxy.