Manesy Ceja-Cevallos is an upcoming 4th year student majoring in Integrative Biology with a concentration in Human Biology and a minor in English. She is a bilingual Mexican-Ecuadorian first generation college student who grew up in Cerritos, California. Manesy is passionate about finding solutions to improve people’s access to healthcare. She specifically wants to help communities that have been overlooked in the past, such as low-income people of color. She hopes to attend medical school and help these underrepresented populations. Currently, Manesy is leading an experiment under the Center for Research and Education on Aging. In this research, she studies how specific parts of the human body decline throughout life, and the implications of diseases related to age such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. This research includes working with human subjects, submitting research proposals, and ultimately collecting data that will be presented in a scientific paper. She is very excited to help other students on campus conduct research and succeed in their work!

Please feel free to reach out to Manesy for any help on understanding the research process, scientific methods or papers, on-campus experiments, and the application process for research. She is more than happy to help students with any interest or questions about the human body, healthcare systems, and medical school.

Chelsea Chen is from Milpitas, California, majoring in psychology focusing on clinical and biological psychology. She is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants.
Chelsea has research assisted for the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory, Relationships and Social Cognition Laboratory, the Berkeley Psychophysiology Laboratory, and the Walker Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, reflecting interests in social psychology, clinical psychology, and neuroscience.
Chelseas research and career goals include studying neurodegenerative disease, working on clinical therapies that are non-invasive, developing neuropsychological assessments, and improving neuroimaging technology. She hopes to improve affordability and access to health care, particularly for psychiatric and psychological care, remove stigma surrounding conversations about emotions and mental health, and increase representation in health care and psychology.
Feel free to reach out to Chelsea for questions or conversations of any kind, as she is very eager to mentor fellow students as well as make new friends!

Hoa Luong transferred to UC Berkeley after graduating from Berkeley City College with high honor in 2015. Originally, Hoa came from Vietnam where she had been working as a middle school teacher for more than 20 years.
Hoa double majors in linguistics and psychology. She pursues her research in exploring the essential functions of language in evolution generally and in human development particularly.
Hoa won Sawyer Scholarship for Applied Linguistics in Summer 2017. Her research project briefly outlines some basic characteristics of Vietnamese noun phrase that serve as laying out the two significant differences between the noun phrases in Vietnamese and English that challenges English speakers in learning Vietnamese and Vietnamese speakers in learning English.

Elia Marina Rubio is a senior on a Pre-Health track, pursuing a degree in Social Welfare. She is from a small town in the Napa Valley. Since moving to Berkeley, Elia became incredibly passionate about addressing health disparities through communal and research initiatives. In the future, she is considering a path in medical research or social work. For over a year now, Elia has volunteered at a clinical research lab in UCSF analyzing how different extraction methods of uterine fibroids affect women long term. Last semester she also worked as field officer for the Oakland Health Disparities Project ran by Stanford University. This summer Elia is looking forward to conducting biomedical research in Peru through the Harvard Multidisciplinary Research Training Program. During her free time Elia enjoys playing basketball, exploring the city, and traveling.

Sara J. Santamara is from Santa Ana, California. They research meaning-making in speech communities of color. Sara loves witnessing the lingistic, social, and cultural depth that speech communities of color wield while using language. Its an honor to participate in the legacies of people of color using their voices and their word to create spaces of power. Sara speaks Santa Ana Spanglish, Santa Ana English, Academic English (non-native), and California Working Class Spanish.
Sara is invested in helping others cultivate and realize their own power through planning, envisioning, and connecting with others.
Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads. –Gloria Anzalda,La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Toward a New Consciousness