Current Scholar List

During the summer, we will work at the 17th biannual International AIDS Conference in Mexico City, fundrising and helping with a program that provides scholarships for impoverished women from around the world to attend the conference. Through this, we will help break the cultural silence surrounding AIDS, providing these women a safe place to speak about their personal experiences with the disease. Following this, we will create a similar space for young women at the Dolores Mission parish in East Los Angeles to discuss issues such as healthy sexuality, balanced relationships and positive female identity. Through these dialogues, we will empower these young women to develop confidence in themselves and thus become beacons of hope in fighting a disease that exploits gender inequality.

I have been involved in many forms of Science and Leadership including Science Olympiad, Science Fair (State Level-5 years)and many AP Science courses. As a Central Valley native, I'm fully aware of the need for promotion of science and math in this area. My proposal involves the creation of a booklet outlining the various science related career paths and the steps an individual must take in order to reach that goal. These will be sent to the high schools from Merced to Fresno to give direction and inspiration to students. I will estalish a link beween the UC Merced Pre-Health Professional Club and the area high schools to increase interest and to help build the reputation of the UC Merced campus.I will host a science based Conference to which high school students will be invited.

The International Clearinghouse on Pelagic Plastics (ICPP) is an exciting and timely proposal which is being funded in part, by Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF), a non-profit non-government organization. The ICPP is a free resouce designed to provide information on the science and social science aspects of the problem of plastic pellets polluting the marine environment. These plastic pellets function as a sponge for multiple endocrine-disrupting chemicals already floating in the marine environment. Marine organisms mistake these highly toxic pellets for food, and there is a bioaccumulative effect up the food chain to human beings. A clearinghouse for the private and public sectors would encourage collaboration and exchange of hard to obtain information. It will be a one-stop website and will be instrumental in forming the basis of an international conference to be held in Southern California in 2012, coordinated by AMRF.

I propose to buy laptops from the "One Laptop per Child" program and set up a computer lab at the Roman Catholic School in Kailahun, Sierra Leone. I believe that doing this will help to address many of the developmental and educational problems that the community of Kailahun faces. I would like to raise awareness of the issues facing people in eastern Sierra Leone in the San Diego community by recording stories of the popele I meet and present them at educational events throughout the San Diego area. I'll also provide the opportunity for a letter writing campaign to ask the companies that mine diamonds there to provide more support for infrastructure in these communities. My ultimate goal is to set up a relationship between USD and the community in Sierra Leone, for future expansion by other USD students.

Poverty and associated health, nutrition, and social factors prevent at least 200 million children in developing countries from attaining their developmental potential. Children with cerebral palsy in developing countries face a worse challenge. Functional therapy programs have been effective in ameliorating the living conditions of cerebral palsy in the US. However, the resources allocated to this problem are minimal in the Third World. As a result of shortages in human resources, the children of Phu My, an orphanage for abandoned, neurological-impaired youths in Vietnam, are forced to assume sedentary lifestyles starting from early adolescence or even during infancy. My project aspires to research and develop a cost-efficient, therapeutically-effective program that would offset the negative effects of the children's sedentary lifestyle. A local student organization will be established in Vietnam to address the shortage of human resources. A curriculum outlining the methods of care, the goals and the program, the current medical understnding of adolescent development , and the circumstances and prevalence of cerebral palsy in Vietnam will be established to ensure that a progressive understanding of cerebral palsy in Vietnam is sustained.

I aim to create a sub-program within Music to Heal, devoted entirely to musical education and music therapy for the young patients of the UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital. The program will have two primary goals: to provide musical instruments for the playroom of the Mattel Children's Hospital through Strauss Scholarship funds, individual and commercial donations, and fundraising efforts, and, to mobilize volunteer student musicians to provide weekly or bi-weekly interactive music lessons for the pediatric patients. Implementation of my proposal will involve an on-going collaboration with staff of the Hospital and with the Volunteer Office of the UCLA Medical Center. This collaboration will ensure the permanence of the pediatric Interaction Program. The musical education component tot he music therapy process is an innovative approach to pediatric healing, because it will give young patients the ability to heal themselves through their own musical abilities, even past the duration of their hospital stay.

Southern African countries are faced with an unforgiving HIV/AIDS epidemic, an impoverished, rural landscape, and a severe shortage of medical professionals. One major rural Malawian hospital, St. Gabriel's Hospital, has turned to HIV-positive, drug-adherent volunteers to serve as Community Health Workers (CHWs)to supplement the hospital's small staff. They have become integral components of rural healthcare delivery and referral for the hospital, which serves a rural area of Western Malawi with 250,000 people and an HIV prevalence rate of 10-20%. This project will lead to faster response to patients' needs, increased voluntary enrollment and participation in the CHW progrm, and more accurate collection of statistics, fewer opportunistic infections due to treatment failure, and increased self-efficacy of CHWs. This project will propose a new model for the utilization of CHWs, both in Malawi and in other resource-limited settings worldwide.

Intelligent Mobility International is a non-profit corporation founded last year by students at the California Institute of Technology and the Art Center of Design. The goal of IMI is to provide a mobility solution that is appropriate for the developing world. IMI has devised a way of converting mountain bikes into rugged wheelchairs that can handle the rough terrain and treatment that they will face in developing nations. Through connections at Caltech, IMI is poised to open a shop in Guatemala. However, the solution needs to be scaled up. By making contacts at other universities, I hope to form teams that will investigate the logistics of opening up in other developing nations.

I am proposing to plant an organic garden inside the California Institute for Women, a prison in Chino, California. The garden will be cooperatively planned, built, and maintained by women inside the prison and outsie community members from the Claremont Colleges, the City of Claremont, Cal Poly Pomona, and the Women and Criminal Justice Network. The garden will offer educational and rehabilitative opportunities to the women inside. In addition,it will provide a forum for discussing environmental issues and their political, economic, and social significance.

During the summer, we will work at the 17th biannual International AIDS Conference in Mexico City, fundrising and helping with a program that provides scholarships for impoverished women from around the world to attend the conference. Through this, we will help break the cultural silence surrounding AIDS, providing these women a safe place to speak about their personal experiences with the disease. Following this, we will create a similar space for young women at the Dolores Mission parish in East Los Angeles to discuss issues such as healthy sexuality, balanced relationships and positive female identity. Through these dialogues, we will empower these young women to develop confidence in themselves and thus become beacons of hope in fighting a disease that exploits gender inequality.

Berkeley Technology Academy (B-Tech) is a continuation High School in West Berkeley that serves low-income African American and Latino youth. B-Tech students have histories of academic, social, and emotional difficulties, and are struggling to complete high school and achieve basic proficiency in California state standards. The B-Tech Media Project will work with at least three accredited classes to integrate community media and technological skills into the curiiculum and engage young people in school by linking students' out-of-school lives to curriculum.The central premise of this project is that understanding, discussing, and creating media about the experiences of B-Tech students and their communities develop the critical analysis and confidence necessary to challenge structures of inequality. This project also aims to close the "digital divide" by connecting students and their academic coursework to innovative uses of technology. The B-Tech Community Media Project places students in internships with local media organizations and provides a small stipend upon completion of the internship. I will also organize a "Tech Team" of B-Tech students to teach their peers how to use audio equipment and software. The end result will be the expansion of a small pilot project begun in Fall 2007 into a permanent, wide-reaching and sustainable community media program that acts as a vehicle for personal empowerment and community deveoplment at B-Tech.

Although many Eagle Rock and Highland Park residents in East Los Angeles face food insecurity, currently there exists no community strategy to address hunger. I propose to bring a team of Occidental students to teach weekly lessons on food insecurity and other social justice issues in a aclassroom at Franklin High School, located in Highland Park. The Occidental teaching team will focus on food insecurity in Los Angeles County and bring in speakers and experts from government and policy groups as well as NGOs working to fight hunger locally. Franklin students will gain practical knowledge in class topics through monthly volunteer trips to local soup kitchens, missions and other social justice organizations. At the end of the class, students will create proposals on how to end hunger in Eagle Rock/Highland Park. By bringing together high school students, Occidental students, and community members to focus on hunger, this class will facilitate community dialogue and commitment to create a plan to end local food insecurity. This class will become a permanent branch of Project EDEN, a soup kitchen project run by the Center for Community Based Learning at Occidental College.

My proposal is to develop a self-actualizing, self-governing student leadership organization under the direction of a microfinance institution (MFI) for children who were once child laborers in South India. The institution, Activists for Social Alternatives Grama Vidiyal, located in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, is an MFI which also provides community services for its members and their communities. More specifically, they provide free education for students who were once child laborers. This project will consist of three main phases including a "Child Leader" Camp (which includes leadership workshops, mediation workshops and a literacy campaign for students), a California fundraising tour (to create an endowment that would generate large enough interest to leave as a source of scholarships for the students in these schools) and a final "leadership field trip" for the selected "child leaders" to an institute of higher education in Chennai. This proposal connects the power of micro finance and the power of a holistic and leadership-oriented education as a grassroots effort against poverty. It challenges students, empowers parents, and provides opportunities for wide, international community involvement - including communities in South India as well as Southern California.

THe Ella Baker Center for Human Rights is an organization in Oakland that works with youth both in and coming out of the prison system. Their newest campaign, Green For All, is helping youth find suitable work opportunities, while building the "green" economy. My Strauss project will consist of three different parts. The first will be to coordinate youth participation in the public launching of the oakland Green Jobs Corps in July 2008, a model program for the whole nation. The second part will be to develop promotion and outreach materials to help create a network of businesses that are willing to employ the trained workers. And lastly, I will work with local Oakland and Bay Area youth to create a presentation about the relevance of climate change to everyone, aimed at middle and high schools.

This community service project is two fold. I am passionate about establishing a community organization that focuses on the deaf community of students here at UC Davis. I will create a network that solely focuses on connections betweent the deaf, and hard of hearing people and understand our common causes and purposes. I will also create a mentorship, outreach , recruitment program that allows UC Davis students to go to various schools such as the California School for the Deaf, mainstream middle schools and high schools, and community colleges to hold presentations in order to motivate and encourage these students to pursue an education at UC Davis.