2021-22 Graduate Mentor

Biography: Pritha Agarwal is a first year PhD student in CMCI college. Before that, she got her masters from Washington State University in Communications. When she is not getting excited about her research, she usually likes to socialize with her friends and meet new people. She likes dogs but doesn't have one yet. Last year, she worked at the Virtual Reality lab and now is definitely an excellent gamer in...

Biography: Sophie is a first year PhD student at CU Boulder in the Aerospace Engineering Sciences department and Remote Sensing, Earth, and Space Sciences focus area. Her research interests include the use of GPS reflected signals for earth science applications. She is originally from Seattle, but spent the past four years in Boston, where she got her bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering and minor in Physics from MIT. In her...

Biography: Margie is a Physics Ph.D. student and NSF GRFP Fellow here at CU Boulder. She works in the Ion Storage Group at NIST on a new project to build a nuclear atomic clock with Thorium ions and uses it for precision measurements of interesting fundamental physics. She went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for undergrad where she majored in both physics and math and most...

Biography: Sarah Colón Plaza is currently in her second year of the inaugural PharmD/PhD Concurrent Degree Program here at CU. After graduating from CU, she aims to work in a research laboratory with the determination of enhancing existing drugs that will lead to the development of further effective therapeutic approaches against terminal diseases. As part of her Ph.D., she studies how cells regenerate after exposure to ionizing radiation, one of...

Biography: After growing up in a small town in western Massachusetts, Catherine attended and graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont. She taught at a high school on the border of the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico. Catherine is now in her fourth year of a Ph.D. program in History, with a focus on Native nations and reservation border towns in the Four Corners region of the Southwest. When not...

Biography: Laurel is a fourth year doctoral student in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU. Her research interests lie at the intersection of social and health psychology, and are broadly focused on how our social experiences shape our physical health and health behavior. Her primary line of research, which is supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, explores how social stigma influences the health risk behaviors...

Biography: Taj is a 2nd year PhD student in Information Science at CU Boulder, advised by Leysia Palen. Her research interests continue to evolve but generally focus on how and why marginalized communities create data to fight injustices. Some of her proudest research experiences have led to titles such as NSF GRFP Honorable Mention; Fulbright Awardee; ARCS Fellow; and CU Engage Community-Based Research Fellow. She arrived here in Boulder by...

Biography: Olivia is a physicist who studies ion-neutral gas phase chemical reactions in ultra-high vacuum conditions. She earned her BS in Physics as a Smittcamp Honors Scholar at California State University, Fresno. Olivia worked with CSU Fresno Professor Yongsheng Gao on a collaborative project with the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. This work sent her to Switzerland for an exciting summer of High Energy Physics...

Biography: Payton is a Colorado native who grew up in Englewood. He is a first year PhD student in the Biomedical Engineering Department. Before starting graduate school he completed his BS in Biomedical Engineering from UNC Chapel Hill and NC State. He is also part of the Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology program and will join Mark Borden’s lab after the first year. His research will consist of using therapeutic ultrasound to...

Dillon is a 4th year PhD candidate in the Behavioral Neuroscience program. His research uses cutting edge technology to selectively monitor and manipulate distinct genetically separable neurons and their circuits during stress and drug seeking paradigms using mouse models. His thesis work interrogates sub-cellular signaling mechanisms in the lateral habenula that contribute to social and fear deficits following traumatic stress.

Biography: Patrick is a graduate student in Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Management, with a focus on astrodynamics. Before attending CU Boulder, Patrick graduated with an Aerospace Engineering degree from Georgia Tech. While at Tech, Patrick was selected for the Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship and had internships at the University of Tennessee Space Institute working on hypersonics research, ATA Engineering performing finite element analyses on aerospace structures, and Roccor where he worked...

Biography: Marisa is a first year PhD student and NSF GRFP Fellow in the Aerospace Engineering Department at the Nonequilibrium Gas and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory. Her research is in understanding the computational capabilities and efficiency of Vlasov-solver plasma simulations. Born and raised in Brooklyn, she did her B.S. in Physics at SUNY Stony Brook, where she bounced between different areas of physics research until finally discovering her interest in computational...

Biography: Matt is a second year PhD student in the Social Psychology program. Matt is proud to be a queer scientist. Matt's research has two main interests. First, Matt study's the ways racial stereotyping and prejudice maintain socioeconomic racial inequalities, and vice-versa. Second, Matt is interested in the impact of media representation of people with marginalized racial identities on prejudice and belonging. Outside of research, the opportunity to be a...

Biography: Sean graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a B.S. in Psychological & Brain Sciences in 2020. At CU Boulder, he is a member of the Evolution and Social Cognition (ESC) lab where they take an evolutionary approach to understanding human behavior and cognition. Sean is broadly interested in the functional role of prosocial emotions in establishing and maintaining cooperative relationships. Throughout his graduate studies, he hopes to pursue the...

Biography: Saydie is a Native American (Zuni Pueblo and Mescalero Apache) Ph.D. student in the Integrative Physiology program. She was born and raised in Colorado and received her bachelor’s and master’s degree at CU Boulder. Saydie is part of Dr. Christopher Lowry’s Behavioral Neuroendocrinology lab. Her research involves investigating alternative treatments for mental health problems using a soil bacteria strain, Mycobacterium vaccae NCTC 11659. Learning the basic mechanisms of how...

Biography: Sage is a first generation student and went to Southern Oregon University - a smaller school close to home. He majored in math and got minors in stats and computer science. SOU is not well known, and it was difficult for him to get accepted into graduate schools. His professors were very encouraging, but they were not active in the research community so he didn't really understand what made...

Biography: Katie is second-year PhD student and NSF GRFP Fellow in computer science. Katie was born and raised in Indiana and received her BS in computer science from Indiana University in spring 2019. She is currently studying structural inequality in social systems, specifically retention in higher education and science. She participated in a similar program as the McNair Scholars in her undergrad, and it was the main reason she decided...

Biography: Christopher Sullivan is a fifth-year Ph.D. student under Dr. Natasha Bosanac at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research leverages multi-objective reinforcement learning to explore the trajectory design space for low-thrust-enabled missions in multi-body gravitational environments.

Jhair is a first-generation Mexican-American first year doctoral student here at CU Boulder. She is conducting addiction research as a Ph.D student in Dr. Mike Saddoris' laboratory. She is aspiring to become a professor and have her own lab for a career but also to mentor undergraduate and graduate students. She is very easy going and loves helping people, which is why she loves to be a mentor for this...