Outreach

One of my biggest personal commitments is to encourage students, especially women, to pursue their academic goals. Since my early days in college I have oriented women about university application processes and other subjects, (e.g., math or biology). Currently, I am still working very closely to Colombian women who want to apply to graduate school abroad, by giving them advice in the preparation process (e.g., English certification exams and improving their curriculum).

At Iowa State University (ISU), I was the Director of Outreach of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Ph.D. program. In this role, I lead initiatives to enrich programs as: Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE), Science Bound and Girls in Science. All these initiatives encourage high school girls to pursue a STEM field, give them the opportunity to interact with women scientists, and provide scholarships to start an undergraduate degree at ISU.

In our department -Plant Pathology, I volunteer in the Master-gardener outreach program which teaches disease-diagnosis practices to Iowans. In the Wise lab we also developed outreach programs such as the Research Experience for Teachers, that trains high school teachers in a research lab environment; and iTAG Barley (Inheritance of Traits and Genes), a curriculum that enables students to learn concepts in plant development, genetics, and genomics.