2022 Summer Work Experience Program

2022 Summer Work Experience Fellows

The UCGHI Planetary Health Center of Expertise Summer Work Experience Program helps UC students gain valuable work experience by pairing them with host mentors from the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, the California Department of Conservation, and the California Department of Public Health. Students gain hands-on experience by working in programs involved in conservation, natural resources, agriculture, policy, nutrition, and health.

Please join the PHCOE in congratulating the 2022 Summer Work Experience Fellows!

Trent Baldwin
UC Davis

Trent is a second year Master’s Student within the Community Development Graduate Group at UC Davis. Their research focuses on Positive Youth Development, health disparities, and participatory action research. Trent worked with Liliana, Ana, and Lucy to deliver STEM programming in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, assisting with development of youth curriculum on Ethnic and Racial Identity and Computer Science, and developed a program model and evaluation plan for a California Parks Dept. funded outdoor equity program that aims to increase youth and community access to outdoor spaces and recreation activities in underserved communities.

Kareena Barboza
CSU Fresno

Kareena is an undergraduate student in the Plant Science department at the California State University, Fresno. This summer, she is working with Sandipa Gautam of the UC ANR Lindcove focusing on the IMP practices in Citrus. She is actively working with PCAs, collecting traps, and interpreting data. Kareen is also spending tie working with Ping Gu to help with multiple running projects for Sandipa.

Austin Brown
UC Davis

Austin is a M.S. student in the Animal Biology Group at UC Davis where he works in Dr. AlisonVan Eenennaam`s lab. For his fellowship he helped collect and organize a survey and examination of the presence of Ovine Progressive Pneumonia to better understand the impacts of mastitis and early culling of ewes in California sheep flocks. This involved a lot of traveling across California to collect blood samples and offered amazing opportunities to interact with sheep producers from across the country.

Paulina DeBus
Wageningen University and Research

Paulina is a second year Masters of Organic Agriculture student at Wageningen University and Research, with a Bachelors of Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems from UC Davis. She is completing the last section of her studies, a fourmonth long internship, at Hopland Research and Extension Center where she is working on the cattle lease project and a webinar and symposium planning and outreach project on livestock integrated cropping systems for SAREP. She is looking forward to connecting with farmers in the area and creating meaningful outreach.

Erica Garibay
UC Berkeley

Erica Garibay is a senior at UC Berkeley majoring in Conservation and Resources with an area of interest in sustainable agri-food systems. She is passionate about agroecological practices that build ecosystem health and increase resilience within local food systems. She also hopes to empower marginalized communities throughout her future career. This summer, Erica worked with Urban Agriculture and Small Farms teams at UCCE Santa Clara where she engaged with diverse stakeholders, including Spanish-speaking small farmers, profiled a local university’s student garden, researched and outreached to urban farms in the region, and translated summaries relating to organic management methods into Spanish.

Maya Homsy King
UC Davis

Maya Homsy King is an MPH student in Global Health and Environment at UC Berkeley. She is interested in health at the human-wildlife interface and is especially interested in the borders between communities and national parks, and the ways in which we can prevent zoonotic disease spillover and promote healthy ecosystems in both areas. This summer, she is working with Gorilla Doctors at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park to carry out an occupational health survey of park staff. She will be providing recommendations in the form of a report to the Uganda Wildlife Authority, Gorilla Doctors, and Bwindi Community Hospital on how best to improve health services for staff.

Elizabeth Isenhower
UC Davis

Elizabeth Isenhower is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of California, Davis majoring in Animal Science. She is interested in veterinary public health and outreach. She hopes to work towards a DVM following graduation and wants to pursue a career in large animal veterinary medicine. This summer she worked with Dr. Pires in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine Department of Population, Health, and Reproduction to develop biosecurity plans for small, mostly organic, multi-species farms. The project mainly focused on adapting biosecurity programs meant for commercial operations into practices that could be implemented by smaller farms.

Skylar Johnson
University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Skylar is a veterinary medicine student at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. They have a background in global disease biology and epidemiology. This past summer, they partnered with Dr. Ariel Loredo and Dr. Samuel Sandoval Solis in studying the effects of beaver dam analogues on surface water quality and their efficacy in reducing the burden of Cryptosporidium parvum and Giardia duodenalis. I assisted my colleagues with study design, field work and laboratory processing. During the fellowship, they were able to improve their wet lab and field skills, as well as learned about hydrology, something that they had no previous experience with. Skylar hopes to use these new skills to be a better, more well-rounded veterinarian in the future.

Ariel Loredo
UC Davis

Ariel Loredo is a graduate student in the UC Davis Epidemiology program in the labs of Dr. Woutrina Smith and Dr. Brian Bird. She is studying zoonotic disease dynamics in a wet meadow restoration and fire recovery in the northern Sierra Nevada. She is interested in working at the intersection of wildlife, zoonotic disease and the environment in an academic or government position in the future. As part of the SWEP program, she is paired with Dr. Martin Smith to help teach her the skills of managing application cycles for a complex program.

Alyssa Mandujano
UC Santa Barbara

Alyssa Mandujano is a senior at UC Santa Barbara, receiving her bachelor’s degree in Global Studies, minoring in Poverty, Inequality, & Social Justice. After studying abroad in Barbados for the 2021/22 school year, Alyssa is passionate about social justice related work and back at UCSB studying to receive her Intersectional Justice Certificate. Alyssa is working with the Santa Barbara County 4-H Youth Development Program under Liliana Vega and is currently assisting with the development of the “Aventuras Afuera” program - seeking to provide quality, community based, outdoor education, environmental justice, identity development, Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion based programs to children from diverse and low-income communities in Santa Barbara County. Alyssa hopes to actively dismantle the psychological perpetuation of injustice and positively contribute to the lives of others by working to unearth the beauty, agency, and unique identities within young people across all cultures.

Siqi Wang
UC Davis

Siqi Wang is a MPVM student at the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California, Davis, interested in emerging infectious diseases. Her professional goal is to become an epidemiologist in the Conservation Medicine and One Health framework. This is a fantastic career path that merges her interests in medicine, conservation, and the population health of all species. This summer, she is working with Dr. Emmanuel Okello on Infectious diseases of food animals at VetMed Teaching & Research Center, Tulare, CA. She is willing to get the hands-on working experience in infectious diseases with researchers, policy-makers, and dairy producers and gain insight into how professional connections are made and sustained.

Troy Williams
UC Davis

Troy Williams is a Senior at UC Davis, completing a double major in Environmental Science and Plant Science, with a focus on crop-atmosphere interactions. Throughout his career, he hopes to use his skills to improve the sustainability, and the nutritional value of America’s food systems. Additionally, he hopes to contribute to increasing resiliency and food security in the face of a changing global climate. Troy has worked with multiple labs on the UCD campus and has recently partnered with the Master Food Preservers program to update a variety of web-based resources through the UC ANR website; spreading access to knowledge that will enable people all over the country to safely preserve foods in their home kitchens. This comprehensive and publicly available online resource can empower home gardeners to safely make their harvest last all year and cut down on food waste.

Allison Work
UC Berkeley

Allison is an MPH student in the Environmental Health Sciences department at University of California, Berkeley interested in the relationship between land use and the health of the planet’s ecosystems and the people in them. This summer, she is working with Devii Rao of UCCE San Benito County on two projects relating to the impacts of cattle grazing on California lands: one focused on grazing’s role in improving habitat for special status species at a prairie restoration site in Pinnacles National Park, and another related to changes in grazing over time across the state and associated impacts on wildfire fuels