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Stephanie Cruz Maysonet currently a senior
undergraduate student at the University of Puerto
Rico in Bayamón (UPRB), pursuing a BS in
General Biology. She is involved in various
extracurricular activities, including the UPRB’s
ESA SEEDS Chapter, L.I.F.E. and a literary
workshop. During her presidency of the student
organization L.I.F.E., the chapter won, Chapter of
the Year,” a national recognition. Stephanie has participated in
two NSF, REU programs and is currently studying tropical
biology in a semester abroad course offered by the Organization
for Tropical Studies in Costa Rica. She has twice received
travel awards (2010 and 2011) from SEEDS to participate in the
Annual Meetings of the Ecological Society of America, where
she presented her research work.
Dr. Sandra Cruz-Pol earned his B.S degree in
Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico
Mayagüez. Her MS degree was from the Univ. of
Massachusetts at Amherst, where she worked
with Phase errors for Polarimetric. She obtained
her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the
Pennsylvania State University at the
Communications and Space Sciences Lab. There
she concentrated in the area of microwave remote sensing. She
is currently a professor at UPRM, the largest Hispanic
Engineering College and the seventh largest Engineering
College in the USA. Dr. Cruz-Pol is currently working in various
projects sponsored by NSF, NASA, IBM and IAP. Her research
interests include Microwave Remote Sensing of natural
phenomena, Modeling of the Microwave Atmospheric Absorption
and the Microwave Sea Surface Emissivity, and stratus cloud
studies using W and Ka-Bands.
Dr. Vivian I. Bonano Rivera
completed her BS in Biology at the
University of Puerto Rico-Cayey in
2001. She participated in
undergraduate research programs
such as the Howard Hughes and
MBRS-RISE and NSF-LSAMP
sponsored activities such as PRISM
and the weekly seminar series. Vivian also participated in the
summer program at Duke University and the Sackler summer
program at Tufts University. She later obtained a PhD degree
in the Genetics and Genomics Program at Duke University.
She is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sao
Paulo, studying the use of alternative chemotherapeutic agents
as treatments against Leishmaniasis, and has presented her
work at the annual meetings of the Brazilian Society of
Protozoology.
José A. Rivera-Meléndez Graduated in 2007
from the University of Puerto Rico – Bayamón with
a BS in General Biology. In 2005, He participated
in the Summer Research Opportunity Program
(SROP) at University of Illinois, Chicago. He
worked with LNCAP cells (cancerous cells). He
realized that he wanted to go into biology when he
changed degree programs in 2003. He received a
research fellowship from LSAMP and worked in the Guanica Dry
Forest of Puerto Rico quantifying seedlings of Plumeria alba. In
August 2010, he was accepted into the Biology Graduate Program
at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras and was awarded the
Bridge to the Doctorate Fellowship Cohort VIII. He is currently in a
MS program working with the diversity of bats in a neotropical
urban center in Puerto Rico.
Samuel Gonzalez is a Computer Science student
at the University of Puerto Rico at Bayamon. He is
a member of the Honor program and also does
research. He has presented his research at
PRISM, Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving
Institutions (CAHSI), and at an international
symposium, the Society for Modeling and
Simulation (SCS) in Boston. Since his childhood,
Samuel was always interested in Computers, and as soon as he
started college he knew Computer Science was his field. Two
years into his bachelor degree, he began conducting research as
part of the LSAMP, where his knowledge and motivation to keep
focused in the area of Science increased. Currently, Samuel is
working as a freelance Web developer and conducting research,
this motivates him to continue post graduate studies in Computer
Science related studies.
Dr. Edgardo García-Berríos
received his B.S. in Chemistry
(Magna Cum Laude) from the
University of Puerto Rico at Cayey
in 2004. As an undergraduate, he
became a RISE (Research
Initiative for Student
Enhancement) and NASA Space
grant fellow where he had the
opportunity to investigate the physicochemical development and
functionalization of metallic and semiconductor thin films.
Furthermore, Edgardo obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the
California Institute of Technology in 2011. His research
comprised the development of new sensing technologies in route
to develop a chemically-sensitive electronic nose for medical
diagnosis and explosives detection. Edgardo accomplished such
research work under the supervision of Prof. Nathan S. Lewis.
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