World-Class CUNY Students Win Nation’s Top Academic Awards
An Irrepressible Global Do-Gooder
THROUGH A CHILDHOOD of migration, repression and exile, Evgeniya Kim found the elements that would shape her outlook on life.
She was born in what is now North Korea, but her family soon moved to Russia’s Far East for a better life. There, Kim learned Russian as her first language. However, her family would be uprooted again due to repression and exiled to rural Uzbekistan. There, Kim says her family adjusted as an ethnic minority even as they struggled to retain their cultural values.
“Koreans are a tiny minority in Uzbekistan so it was important to hold on to my Korean heritage even though we did not even speak Korean,” Kim said. “When you are a minority – racially, ethnically, religiously, as was the case with my family – it is easy to become marginalized, especially when the country is poor and corruption is commonplace. My father had to work really hard as a farmer to provide for our family and my mother stayed at home even though both of them had engineering degrees.”
At the age of 14, Kim and her family immigrated to the United States, where they were granted asylum. After graduating from Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Queens in 2006, Kim enrolled at Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College and majored in international relations.
“What I loved the most [about Macaulay] is the diversity of the student body that made me feel right at home, especially because of my own unique background,” she said.
Kim, 27, is one of four CUNY women awarded the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. As a fellow, Kim will receive up to $90,000 for graduate studies at the Yale School of Management where she is currently pursuing her MBA.
In Uzbekistan, Kim’s Korean heritage and Russian upbringing often brought uncomfortable questions from classmates. Yet she found solace on the tennis court as a member of Uzbekistan’s national junior tennis team and bonded with players she met during international tournaments.
“When I was just a kid, playing tennis internationally, I started traveling around Central Asia and had my first big tournaments in India and Indonesia. That's when I met so many players from all around the world and fell in love with the international experience,” she said.
Combining her love of international development and business, Kim began working at the Soros Economic Development Fund, analyzing the impact of the fund’s investments on 21.4 million people across 20 countries. As a future career, Kim hopes to become a consultant for organizations that have a similar global impact.
“I loved how diverse our projects were,” Kim said. “From a financial services project in Mexico, agriculture deal in Ghana to a hospital in India and a port in Tanzania, I felt that our work reached those that were most in need.”
Outthinking Brain Proteins
NEURONS – NERVE CELLS that both send and receive electrical signals – communicate through a complex signaling system that includes a protein called alpha-synuclein. Scientists know that mutations in the gene that produces this protein can cause familial Parkinson’s disease.
They also know this protein is found in the brains of people with all forms of the disease Dalila Ordonez (Hunter College, B.A., Biopsychology ’13), a doctoral student in Harvard University’s Molecules, Cells and Organisms Program, intends to discover precisely how alpha-synuclein leads to nerve degeneration. Her research is supported by a 2015 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She is a graduate of Grover Cleveland High School.
Working with Mel Feany, a professor in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, Ordonez studies fruit flies that have been genetically modified to overexpress alpha-synuclein, which recreates the clinical features of Parkinson’s disease. Just like humans, fruit flies with this condition develop problems with movement and lose nerve cells that are essential for survival.
“I’m looking into genes that have homology to humans,” Ordonez says, using a term referring to genes that have a similar function. “If what we find is true in the fruit fly, it’s likely that we’ll see the same in a mouse and in humans.”
She hypothesizes that alpha-synuclein causes toxicity by misregulating another protein, actin, which is found in all nerve cells. When actin goes awry, it interferes with the workings of mitochondria, the parts of cells that generate energy. If this turns out to be true, Ordonez explains, researchers will have a new model for alpha-synuclein dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease, which could open up additional avenues for treatment.
The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This federal grant provides $138,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
Trapping Greenhouse Gases
SCIENTISTS AGREE that greenhouse gases are changing Earth’s climate. Carbon dioxide is expelled when creatures breathe, vegetation rots and Arctic soils defrost. Nitrogen, more than three-quarters of our air, pollutes when oxidized by combustion and other processes. But what if carbon and nitrogen could be pulled out of the atmosphere and locked up as minerals? Johnathan Culpepper (Medgar Evers College, A.A., Mass Communications, ’06; B.S., Environmental Science ’09) will explore that idea with a 2015 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Working with civil and environmental engineering professor Michelle Scherer at the University of Iowa College of Engineering, Culpepper intends to research iron’s potential to sequester carbon and nitrogen. Iron is the fourth most abundant element on Earth, after oxygen, silicon and aluminum. It easily reacts with other elements, forming stable compounds both on land and in the oceans. “I hypothesize that there is a unique iron pathway that influences and is interdependent on the better understood carbon and nitrogen cycles,” Culpepper says. (“Cycles” refers to the natural exchange of elements among living things, soils, rocks, oceans and atmosphere.) “There is limited understanding of how iron minerals interact with carbon and nitrogen,” he explains. He questions why the surfaces of iron oxide minerals can lock up organic carbon; how iron oxide interactions preserve carbon in water and soil; and how carbon and nitrogen compounds can rapidly attach to iron surfaces. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Culpepper worked his way through Medgar Evers as an international student by selling his art, from paintings to logo designs. As an undergraduate, he mentored high school chemistry and physics students in the Collegiate Science and Technology Entry program (CSTEP), guiding teams to first- and second-prize victories in statewide competitions. He worked as a chemistry lab technician and interned in a NASA-funded atmospheric research project; his job was to prepare all apparatus and chemicals used to detect ozone using helium-filled balloons.
After earning his bachelor’s, Culpepper “wanted to give back” to the Medgar Evers community. For three years he taught English writing, mathematics and general science to adults in POISED for Success, which is funded by CUNY’s Research Foundation. He also taught 100- to 200-level undergraduate courses in English composition and writing, algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus, art history, physics and general and organic chemistry.
Now married, the father of two daughters and becoming a U.S. citizen, Culpepper says he “wants to become a professor of environmental engineering in a research-intensive institution.” His target is “elemental cycles and interactions within our soil, water and atmospheric systems.”
The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is the most prestigious for graduate studies in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The federal grant provides $138,000 over three years for doctoral-level research.
His work is a gas
BENJAMIN RUDSHTEYN wants to destabilize carbon dioxide. This could
help minimize the growth of this climate-changing greenhouse gas while pro
ducing useful industrial chemicals.
Rudshteyn (Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College, ’13) is pursuing
a doctorate in computational chemistry at Yale University. With a 2015 Na
tional Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship that’s worth
$138,000, he uses computer modeling to create catalysts that can reduce car
bon dioxide (that is, make it take on an extra electron).
“By adding one electron, carbon dioxide becomes more unstable, so it re
acts more easily with organic compounds and converts them into interesting
products,” he explains.
Supercomputers let him test possible catalysts far more easily than experi
mentalists could if they first had to synthesize novel molecules. ”Our compu
tational chemistry methods limit the possibilities for new molecules to those
that are synthetically reasonable,” he says. “We’re designing an algorithm that
will suggest catalysts with lower barriers for each reaction step, making them
more energy efficient.”
Rudshteyn’s mentor is Yale professor Victor S. Batista, whose theoretical
chemistry group develops and applies new methods for describing quantum
processes relevant to photocatalysis (using light to regulate chemical reac
tions) for both solar energy and the biology of sensory systems. One of
Batista’s collaborators, University of Chicago professor Michael D. Hopkins,
carries out the experimental side of Rudshteyn’s research; Hopkins explores
whether tungsten compounds might be the basis for the optimal single-elec
tron reduction of carbon dioxide.
As an undergraduate, Rudshteyn won a highly competitive 2012 Barry
Goldwater Scholarship, the premier federal undergraduate science scholar
ship. Guided by Brooklyn College chemistry professor Alexander Greer, he
ran theoretical simulations on the supercomputer at the CUNY High Per
formance Computing Center at the College of Staten Island and at the Na
tional Science Foundation-supported Extreme Science and Engineering
Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the world’s most advanced virtual super
computing system.
In his Goldwater project, he speculated that life could have arisen in the
sulfur-rich early Earth before oxygen became abundant or in a similar envi
ronment elsewhere in the universe. In published findings, he reported that he
generated hypothetical DNA-like strands of a sulfur compound that could
have been precursors to amino acids, the building blocks of life.
Born in Brooklyn, Rudshteyn attended Midwood High School. His parents
trained as engineers in Belarus and retrained at Brooklyn College. His father,
Alex, earned a master’s in computer and information science and is the col
lege’s director of library entrepreneurship, systems and network support. His
mother, Anna Rozenbaum, earned a mas
ter’s in health and nutrition science and
works as a dietitian.