2018 Chacellor’s Undergraduate Research & Creative Practice Mentor Awards
Charity Akhidenor (2019, NHS, left) with Jody Early and Sara Cole (2017, IAS, right)
Dr. Jody Early
Associate Professor, School of Nursing and Health Studies
Affiliate Faculty, School of IAS: Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies
Dr. Jody Early is an Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and Health Studies and affiliate faculty in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and the Latino Center for Health. Whether it’s helping students explore their own research questions, or inviting them into her community-engaged public health scholarship as co-collaborators, Dr. Early finds a way to ignite students’ passion for research. “This is not a hierarchal process. We all learn from each other,” Early explains. Jody co-authors papers and presentations with students, and she has seen some become professors and mentors themselves.
Her research and teaching demonstrate values upheld by the university: a commitment to social justice, community engagement, and impact that is local to global. Recently, she (along with her research collaborator, Dr. Carmen Gonzalez) worked with undergraduate student and McNair scholar, Teresa Mata, and PhD student, Laura Robles-Calderon, on a project exploring use of mhealth within Latinx communities and among lay health promoters (e.g. promotores). The group recently presented their findings at the Western Forum for Migrant and Community Health in February 2018. Mata was recently awarded a fellowship to Columbia University’s Summer Scholar programs based on the research with Drs. Early and Gonzales, and Robles-Calderon has a springboard study of her own in the works.
Dr. Early’s cross-disciplinary research with students and colleagues also helps position UW Bothell at the forefront of student learning; she is able to integrate her research into the courses she teaches and provide ways in which students may collaborate with her and with community organizations and stakeholders. For the past academic year, for example, Dr. Early has co-lead (along with STEM professor, Pierre Mourad) a cross disciplinary team of undergraduate and graduate students to design and test a robotic rehabilitative device that gamifies stroke rehabilitation in partnership with Harborview Medical Center.
At a the campus level, Dr. Early has also assisted the campus peer health educators with leading a mixed methods study to explore factors that influence the health and well-being of students at UWB with the goal of designing and implementing more culturally tailored and relative health promotion. The students working with her just submitted an abstract of their findings to the Washington State Public Health Association’s annual conference in Nov. 2018. “Her mentorship results in competent, rigorous and creative researchers with greater goals aimed at making an impact in the lives of people,” wrote Sara Cole, a 2016 Mary Gates scholar, and one of her former mentees.
Dr. Milagros Loreto
Assistant Professor, School of STEM: Engineering & Mathematics Division
Dr. Loreto was a recipient of the 2018 Chancellor’s Mentor Award. She joined UW Bothell in 2014 as Assistant Professor in the School of STEM. Dr. Loreto’s research interest is mainly computational mathematics with focus on numerical optimization. Undergraduate research has been always one of the pillars of her research approach. As soon as she started her position at UW Bothell she became faculty mentor of the REU-program at UWB, mentoring three cohorts of students (2015-2017). She deeply believes undergraduate research can introduce students to a new future as researchers they might never have considered, as it happened to her.
Dr. Milagros Loreto provides a supportive and challenging environment so that students can make substantial contributions to her research work. She engages students both formally and informally regarding graduate school possibilities, and her students disseminate their undergraduate research results at local, regional, and national conferences. Dr. Loreto accomplishes these mentoring activities while pursuing external funding for her own scholarly work as well as for undergraduate research. She has mentored students during both the academic years and summers and recently received a grant from the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) to fund a National Research Experience for Undergraduates to be held on this campus over summer 2018.