Leaders and Advocates in Inclusive Academic Excellence

Sumeyye Seker

Seker is a Nanoengineering PhD candidate, who focuses on the development of electrochemical sensors for monitoring human and plant health. She works to create personalized sensor platforms that enable individuals to monitor their metabolic levels in real time, eliminating the need for hospital visits and reducing healthcare costs.

Why did you choose to explore academia?

During my undergraduate studies, I recognized my potential for teaching and found great fulfillment in mentoring and sharing knowledge with others. I enjoy attending conferences, sharing our innovations with researchers worldwide and learning from their perspectives. While our work may span different or overlapping fields, the common goal of advancing the well-being of people and living organisms unites us.

Why did you choose to attend UC San Diego?

I chose my PhD supervisor and when they accepted me, I discovered that I would be coming to UC San Diego. Upon arriving, I came to understand why my PhD supervisor chose to be a professor here. UC San Diego is a university that offers exceptional support to its students in all aspects. The university provides numerous opportunities for researchers and is fully equipped with all the necessary research facilities, ranging from fabrication to characterization.

What is most rewarding about your work?

I am actively contributing to solving global challenges by developing wearable electrochemical sensors for human and plant health, as well as advancing sustainable agriculture. My work enhances scientific understanding and also paves the way for real-world applications that can help people lead healthier lives and support the environment.

Rayyan Gorashi

Gorashi’s interests center around sex-specific and patient-specific models of heart disease using biomaterials. As a PhD candidate in Bioengineering, her research specializes in creating physiologically relevant disease models to study sex-specific differences in heart valve disease progression to create more equitable treatment options for both male and female patients.

What is the focus of your research?

My research focuses on using biomaterial tools to discover sex differences in heart disease. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death globally. Sex-based disparities need to be investigated to create more equitable treatment for females and males. Investigating these molecular mechanisms of disease is so exciting because we are standing at the forefront of this field and actively making contributions to hopefully help close the gap and bring a more equitable understanding into what drives differences.

Why did you choose to attend UC San Diego?

The graduate community in my department stood out to me. Everyone was incredibly friendly, kind, engaged and emphasized work-life balance. I'm especially interested in the clinical translation of our work, so the strong connection that UC San Diego’s Bioengineering department has with UC San Diego Health was a huge plus.

What is something you hope people learn from you, either through direct interactions or through your work?

I hope I can inspire people to always strive for balance and uplift those around them. None of us get to where we are without the help, mentorship and guidance from others. It's only right to give it back to the community around you.

Abner Francisco Sotenos

Sotenos is a PhD candidate in Latin American History and a scholar of modern Latin American History. His research focuses on Afro-Brazilians' experiences in cinema and black internationalism.

What initially inspired your work, and what continues to inspire you?

I am inspired by my ancestors who, rather than capitulate, chose to fight and build their lives. I saw academia as a way to strengthen my voice and broaden my understanding of the world so that I could help others transform their lives.

Why did you choose to attend UC San Diego?

Several factors led me to choose UC San Diego, including the presence of Black professors working in the department who covered my research topic, San Diego’s climate and the opportunity to experience a culture influenced heavily by Latin American culture.

What is something you hope people learn from you, either through direct interactions or through your work?

I hope that people can be inspired by my journey and learn about resilience. Resilience plays a key role in personal growth and allows individuals to bounce back from setbacks and challenges. Through resilience, people can turn obstacles into opportunities for learning and self-improvement.

Marwa Abdalla

Abdalla is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and a recipient of the Jacobs Fellowship from UC San Diego’s Division of Social Sciences. She is a communication and critical Muslim studies scholar whose work focuses on the prevalence, sanctioning and spread of different forms of racism across traditional and digital media platforms.

What initially inspired your work, and what continues to inspire you?

The majority of U.S. Americans have never met a Muslim, and the majority of media representations of Islam and Muslim are negative. In the past decade, there have been shifts in representations of Muslims; however, many of these seemingly positive representations often rely on the same negative stereotypes. My work seeks to understand and address this paradox.

What is most rewarding about your work? What is most difficult about your work?

We are currently facing an inflection point in the ways digital media are used to spread and challenge exploitative conceptions of identity categories such as race, religion, gender and sexuality. My work brings me into direct contact with difficult historical and contemporary examples of racism and white supremacy. However, it also allows me to understand and address why certain stereotypes persist in the face of empirical data that would otherwise challenge them.

What is something you hope people learn from you, either through direct interactions or through your work?

The celebration of minoritized individuals as "exceptional" at the expense of demonizing the group to which they belong has long served as a tactic for maintaining and perpetuating negative perceptions of a group. I hope that my work helps us move past veneers of inclusion that only celebrate individuals to address the resilience of negative stereotypes that affect how groups are perceived as a whole.

Ivan Valdovinos Gutierrez

Gutierrez’s research seeks to understand the conditions, experiences and outcomes that facilitate success among Latina/o/x students throughout higher education. His work leverages theories and methodologies to create educational environments, experiences and assets-based approaches to dismantle institutional challenges, environmental barriers and social inequities.

What initially inspired your work, and what continues to inspire you?

I began my career in higher education with a mission to develop and implement research-driven, equity-minded policies and practical solutions to address college access and equity issues.

What is something you hope people learn from you, either through direct interactions or through your work?

I hope my work inspires higher education researchers and professionals to reimagine educational systems that better address college access and equity issues to collectively build sustainable, structural change.