Second-year student Zora Williams is using her voice to bring more mental health and nutrition programming to San Diego Mesa College. Williams was elected president of the college’s Associated Students (AS) for the 2024-2025 academic year and serves as the college’s student representative on the San Diego Community College District Board of Trustees.
Sometimes, you hear a story that makes you want to know more. Kevin Gonzalez has such a story. The last time this story was updated, San Diego Mesa College student Kevin Gonzalez was a 15 year-old heading off to Massachusetts to complete his high school education. In the ensuing years, he has travelled to the other side of the world, built houses, but remained in close contact with his Mesa College professors and connections he made while on campus.
The San Diego Community College District has appointed four new student trustees for the upcoming academic year. Dalia Ramirez (San Diego City College), Zora Williams (San Diego Mesa College), Hailey Hua (San Diego Miramar College), and Haydee Zuniga (San Diego College of Continuing Education), will be sworn in during the June 20 SDCCD Board of Trustees meeting.
July 28, 2022
Mireille Kamariza (left) and Jaimie Marie Stewart (right) will join UCLA Samueli next year as assistant professors.
Jul 28, 2022
From the UCLA Samueli Newsroom
The UCLA Samueli School of Engineering is proud to welcome two outstanding scholars to the Bioengineering Department — Mireille Kamariza and Jaimie Marie Stewart — who will join the school next year as assistant professors. Kamariza’s research focuses on low-cost health care diagnostics and Stewart’s research focuses on the development of programmable RNA materials.
“Professors Kamariza and Stewart are among the brightest scholars in their respective emerging fields, and we are very happy they’ll be joining us,” said Song Li, chair and a professor of the Bioengineering Department at UCLA Samueli. “Our students, fellow faculty, the UCLA community and society at large will benefit from their research, teaching and service.”
Their recruitment is part of the school’s Mentor Professor Program, an initiative now in its second year designed to hire faculty who are experts in their fields and who have a demonstrated record of, or who show exceptional promise for, mentorship of students from underrepresented and underserved populations.
Mireille Kamariza is a chemical biologist whose research focuses on infectious disease, including developing low-cost, point-of-care diagnostics. As a doctoral student at Stanford University, she developed a technology that helps to detect and diagnose tuberculosis at the point-of-care, for which she was awarded a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant to test the device. Kamariza is currently a Harvard Junior Fellow working with well-known computational biologist Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. She will join UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of bioengineering in January 2023.
A native of the Republic of Burundi, Kamariza immigrated to the United States and attended San Diego Mesa College. She later transferred to UC San Diego for her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, where she pioneered a mentorship program for transfer students. Kamariza has demonstrated her efforts in diversifying representation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) through similar initiatives, and she intends to continue pushing for more equity and inclusion in scientific academia. She received her master’s degree from UC Berkeley and Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in cell biology. Among other accolades, Kamariza was recognized as one of the World’s Most Powerful Women by Fortune Magazine in 2017 and was named one of Chemical & Engineering News’ Talented 12 in 2020.
Jaimie Marie Stewart is developing RNA technologies for molecular detection and regenerative medicine. Her research focuses on understanding and exploiting the structural and functional complexity of RNA to build RNA materials using principles of biophysics, chemistry and engineering. She is currently a Life Sciences Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, where she works on the design, synthesis and characterization of DNA and RNA structures for the detection and separation of biomolecules. Stewart will join UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of bioengineering in July 2023.
Stewart serves as the RNA Editor for the textbook Art of Molecular Programming and is a member of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee for Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science. She has received several awards and honors, including the 2019 Ford Postdoctoral fellowship and recognition as a fellow by the Intersections Science Fellows Symposium in 2021. She received her B.S. in bioengineering with a concentration in cell and tissue engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her Ph.D. in bioengineering from UC Riverside.
About San Diego Mesa College
San Diego Mesa College is a fully accredited, comprehensive college committed to equity and excellence. We honor our diverse community of students, faculty, professional staff, and administrators who collaborate to foster scholarship, leadership, access, and innovation in an inclusive learning environment. By promoting student learning and achievement that leads to degrees and certificates, transfer, workforce training, and lifelong learning, we empower our students to reach their educational goals and shape their future. Among the largest community colleges in California, Mesa serves 25,000 students per year, 25% of whom are full-time. Mesa offers nearly 200 associate degree and certificate programs and is one of 15 California community colleges offering a four-year baccalaureate degree. Mesa ranks as San Diego’s top transfer institution, is a proud Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI), and a Military Friendly School, serving nearly 2,500 veterans and their families. www.sdmesa.edu.
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Find Mesa College President Dr. Ashanti T. Hands on Social Media
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Tags: UCLA, assistant professor, Equity Champion of Higher Education, Alumni
Jennifer Nichols Kearns
Director of Communications
jnkearns@sdccd.edu
(619) 388-2759
On Monday, March 11, Mesa Dramatic Arts majors were thrilled when five Mesa College alumni came to speak with current students about their journey in the performing arts thus far. The panel, titled Life Post Mesa in the Performing Arts: Transfer and more, was organized by Drama Professor George Ye’. He explained that he wanted to show current students a “cross section of people with different pathways.”
San Diego Mesa College Alumnus Mario Romero made history as part of a team from Intuitive Machines’ whose uncrewed lander made history Thursday as the first privately owned spacecraft to touch down on the lunar surface. It was also the first U.S. vehicle to accomplish this in more than 50 years. After four years of preparations, the company’s 14-foot-tall Nova-C lander navigated to a spot near the moon’s South Pole. It was the 24th mission to softly land on the moon since 1966. And with it comes a new era of exploration.
The Houston Texans continue to pick from the San Francisco 49ers’ coaching staff as DeMeco Ryans forms his new crew with the AFC South. According to Aaron Wilson from KPRC-TV, the Texans are hiring 49ers defensive quality control coach Stephen Adegoke as their new safeties coach.
