Current Scholar List

As the whole world faces health issues related to obesity and the lack of a healthy lifestyle, more research points toward a preventative approach to solving this problem. Targeting children is the key because it has also been shown that children carry their obesity into adulthood. Health issues jeopardize the success of tomorrow's leaders, not to mention their cost to society. For this reason, an intervention program at an early age that targets children and aims to help them develop a healthy lifestyle would be beneficial. The "Amazing Life" program at the Boy's and Girl's Club of Merced County will incorporate nutritional and physical components in a fun and exciting class for children.

To ensure that the growing, yet largely unserviced African population in San Francisco have the opportunity to navigate through different spaces of the city, and assert their presence when necessary, A Place in the World English Access Program seeks to implement a consistent English as a Second Language Class that provides functional English training as a short term goal. In the long-term, however, clients will be trained to be fluent in English, work on resume-building and familiarize themselves with the basic functions of the computer. Employing the wealth of skills in various the U C Berkeley student groups and Bay Area NGOs for the African population, A Place in the World seeks to create one short-term and one long-term teaching curriculum catered towards the primary African groups that populate San Francisco. Student volunteers bilingual in English and Fulani, Amharic, Tigrinyia, Ga, Arabic or French will be trained to teach ESL. A Student-led seminar featuring potential clients of A Place in the World will be taught in the spring semester of 2011 to foster awareness about the perils of immigration and to highlight the different cultures.

Empowerment Through Education is a program that aims to address the cycle of poverty through education.The core of the project is to use the success of the MESA program as a catalyst for engaging homeless youth in their education by integrating MESA Curriculum into the after-school program at the Homeless Services Center in Santa Cruz,CA. The program is innovative in that it takes a proactive approach to poverty, challenging the homeless youth to take control of their education- and their future. It will introduce them to positive college role models as well as assisting them in their academic endeavors, with the ultimate goal of using education to permanently disrupt the poverty cycle.

In Northern Nigeria, a deteriorating health system has resulted in one of the world's highest rates of maternal and infant deaths. This dire situation is only amplified by the lack of an effective health information system, leaving hospitals and clinics to make decisions about patient care with only uninformed guesses about medical history. In 2009, I implemented an electronic medical records system using OpenMRS for the Family Health Unit of the Shehu Idris College of Health Science and Technology (SICHST) in Kaduna, Nigeria. The three-month process resulted in the creation of electronic forms, which greatly reduced data duplication and created a monthly reporting process that takes minutes instead of days. This system provides not only access to the first patient-based health indicators in Nigeria, but also shows the potential to overcome the harsh computing environment. My goals are to expand the project scope to reach more patients by installing additional clinical systems in high maternal mortality areas in Northern Nigeria, increase usability of the clinical systems with touch screens, patient ID cards, and mobile OpenMRS devices for community health workers, and develop training and academic curriculum for the SICHST staff, and staff at supporting NGOs and clinics. Testing and proving the feasibility of an integrated eHealth system using mobile devices is a vital next step to increasing access to health care services.

Skid Row, in Los Angeles, contains the largest concentration of homeless people in the country. The Department of Public and Social Services (DPSS) office, which disburses state and federal benefits, is uncooperative and the regulations are too complex to address the immense number of homeless people. As a result, many people do not receive the public benefits for which they qualify.The result is a never-ending spiral into irreparable poverty. To correct this situation, the General Relief Advocacy Program (GRAP) will train and organize undergraduates to advocate for homeless people in Skid Row to help them receive benefits from DPSS. In conjunction with LA County Public Counsel, a public interest law firm, the training will educate volunteers to advocate for clients. This experience will develop long-term interpersonal skills, while instilling a desire to aid the under-served.

Imagine moving from South Dakota to New York City and discovering that your daughter cannot legally attend high school. Similarly, rural-to-urban migrant students in Beijing are unable to test into normal high schools when they graduate from middle school. Some directly enter the labor market, but quickly lose confidence in their limited abilities. They come to resent their poor salaries, lack of job mobility, and restricted knowledge and access to future opportunities. To address these problems, we partner with the Dandelion middle swchool for migrant youth, Chinese and American professors, as well as students from Tsinghua University to provide career and education information to graduating students. Furthermore, we tutor students in mathematics and English to pass fate-determining entrance examinations to alternative schooling routes. By both inspiring and equipping students to pursue their options, we empower migrants to explore rewarding life paths.

The Catalysts for Education and Environmental Justice (CEEJ) training program will promote positive social change in the low-income neighborhood of Village de L'Est by building civic leadership capacity among a dedicated cohort of passionate high school and college-aged students. The program will be hosted at the Vietnamese American Young Leaders Association of New Orleans (VAYLA-NO) with the support of the organization's staff. My primary goal is to empower youth as community organizers - leaders who can bring people together to identify educational and environmental problems, craft solutions, and pressure appropriate decision makers. Obviating the need for advocates, intermediaries and external forms of leadership, this proposal seeks to bolster the formation of grassroots, youth-driven coalitions capable of envisioning concrete changes and demanding justice from the city's political and economic structures.

Oakland School for the Arts is home to students from all backgrounds, races, and socioeconomic classes. Many OSA Students will be the first in their family to attend college and have not been given access to information about higher education. Through an interdisciplinary, college preparatory curriculum, I hope to provide these students with the academic resources they require to succeed, as well as the artistic inspiration to tell their stories, while extending this empowerment to the community through public performance. By presenting these students' work to the public we not only promote OSA and these individuals, but also emphasize the importance of higher education for young people. In a time in which Oakland's youth suffer the consequences of economic difficulties and decreased access to artistic programs, it is important that we, as a community, fill this deficit and assure students that their achievements and well-being are still a priority.

The Youth Empowerment Program (YEP) provides a network of support and hope to immigrant children held in federal custody at Yolo County Juvenile Hall by connecting them to student role modes from U C Davis. Far from loved ones, family members and any support networks they may have, unaccompanied immigrant children face many challenges within and outside their cell walls. YEP uses a five-month curriculum to help the youth develop teamwork and leadership skills, reflect upon the past and make positive plans for their future while connecting with college student mentors. YEP provides an extensive leadership training program for volunteers by bringing in experts in social work, psychology, and legal fields with the purpose of building future leaders for social justice. YEP volunteers utilize their leadership immediately by working with the children in Juvenile Hall every other week and engaging in direct community outreach. YEP's awareness campaign, which includes an official website, by-monthly newsletter and a culminating campus event, sheds light on what unaccompanied immigrant children experience in the United States. To ensure sustainability of the program, YEP will file for incorporation as a non-profit organization and secure long-term leaders who will facilitate the continuation of the program.

To improve the educational outcomes of foster youth, I propose a new program that matches foster youth in their junior year of high school with mentors identified by the UCLA Bruin Guardian Scholars Program. The Higher Education Summit will offer a series of college readiness workshops, which will culminate in a university application seminar, and will pair the participants with college or graduate level mentors.

In order to curb the spread of HIV in Babati, Tanzania, I will implement a sustainable approach to HIV/AIDS education. Using song, drama, sports and lecture, secondary school students in Babati will take leadership roles in employing a peer education system so that locals will lead the education for years to come in the primary schools, secondary schools, and the larger community.

Project MapDelft is a community development project designed to involve residents of Cape Town's informal communities in the process of participatory mapping. This is a multi-phase, community mapping project which seeks to involve international OpenSourceMap (OSM)volunteers, local community-based organizations, NGOs, and Delft community residents to produce the first detailed, publicly available street-maps of three of Cape Town's fastest growing informal settlements. As such, my project represents an innovative approach to public service, combining both short-term relief and long-term community building objectives to develop a highly flexible, easy-to-use mapping model that will produce an extremely vital and sustainable community resource for the residents of Cape Town's informal Settlements.

My project aims to approach the science curriculum in disadvantaged primary schools through an interactive teacher-student experience. Encouraging individual student involvement is important for classrooms with an English language barrier, as ESL students are often left behind during classroom activities. Children should be exposed not only to textbook theory, but also to practical science in action to stimulate an early interest in the subject. Through field trips, experiments, and student-constructed models, students can learn about topics first-hand while also following the state-ascribed curriculum. I hope to create a program that matches Caltech volunteers with elementary school classrooms and maintain the benefits for future students.