IMPACT

Earlier this fall, more than 6,000 people gathered for the nation’s largest STEM diversity event of the year, the 2023 National Diversity in STEM (NDiSTEM) conference, hosted in Portland, Oregon.

Biochemistry & biophysics Ph.D. student Sarah Louie has been selected as this year's Mathews Fellow. Louie is working with Professor Rick Cooley of the Center for Genetic Code Expansion.

College of Science faculty, staff, and graduate students have earned a record-breaking number of honors at University Day, a celebratory launch to the academic year featuring an annual awards ceremony. Science winners amassed an impressive 12 awards, beating the previous record of seven and garnering the most of any college across Oregon State.

Shaping challenges into opportunities is what chemistry Ph.D. student Abdikani Omar Farah has done nearly all of his life. After growing up in East Africa and experiencing firsthand what it meant to lack access to medicine, Farah now wants to use his career to fill this drug scarcity and give back to his communities.

Four College of Science graduate students were selected for the prestigious NSF Graduate Student Research Fellowship Program in the 2022-23 school year. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in STEM who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in the U.S.

Actinide chemistry is defined by its cutting-edge research, which graduate student Jenna Bustos has a passion for pursuing. From becoming a member of the Nyman Research Group at Oregon State to interning at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Bustos is well-versed in the field and eager to see what it brings next for her.

This past summer, Ph.D. student Savanah Leidholt set out to create a summer “bootcamp” for area high school students to draw more students from BIPOC, LGBTQ+, low-income and other diverse backgrounds to the study of microbiology.

Oregon State University Assistant Professor Swati Patel and two colleagues wanted to do something to counter systemic inequities in mathematics. In response, they founded the Math For All conference at Tulane University in New Orleans. Math For All is now a national conference that hosts regional conferences annually throughout the country, including a satellite location at Oregon State.

Students from Oregon State University along with thousands of other attendees from across the nation were welcomed to the National Diversity in STEM (NDiSTEM) Conference Oct. 27, 2022. The event was built to serve as a reminder that culture and science are not mutually exclusive or contradictory. NDiSTEM asserted that science is not a place to shed culture, but a place where it should thrive.

Wanting to spend more time with his partner and one-year-old son, Angulo Barba applied for the Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science (GEM) Fellowship, a national program that promotes the participation of underrepresented groups in post-graduate science and engineering education and the technical workforce.

After serving in the U.S. Air Force for five years, Erin McCarn decided to start researching graduate programs. The more time she spent searching, the more she realized her passion for chemistry ran deep. An eastern U.S. native, McCarn picked Oregon State because of its proximity to her family and the diverse chemistry graduate research program.

Graduate students in the College of Science are creative, independent and collaborative thinkers and doers. They are also exceptional students, mentors and teachers. This past year, many of our graduate students have received awards, scholarships and fellowships.