Educator of the Year

Celebrating our Graduate School Educators!

By: Angelica Rocha, Ph.D. | Assistant Director, Institutional Research & Academic Planning

A highlight of the annual GSBS social gathering during the New Student Orientation is awarding the crystal apple to the Educator of the Year which, this year, went to Dr. Kevin Yip. Dr. Yip is a new faculty member who joins us from Hong Kong where he was born and raised. In his laboratory, Dr. Yip uses computational methods to understand biological regulations and their perturbations in human diseases. This made him a natural choice as the new Course Director for Biological Databases as a Research Tool (BDRT), a core course for second-year students. Dr. Yip redesigned and oversaw all aspects of the course, with a core team, and received fantastic evaluations from students on every metric. In addition to the Educator of the Year award, at the social gathering, faculty who taught a tutorial or participated in a course were recognized with a Certificate of Appreciation. Thank you to our amazing instructors for educating GSBS students to become the innovative biomedical scientists of the future!

SPARK-ing Interest in Stem Cells & STEM Education

By: Paula Checchi, Ph.D. | Program Manager, Recruitment, Outreach & Achievement This summer, we welcomed our inaugural cohort of young scholars from the Summer Program to Accelerate Regenerative medicine Knowledge (SPARK) internship program. Funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the goal of SPARK is to provide California high school students with an opportunity to gain hands-on training in laboratories at leading research institutes in California. In 2021, our Institute was one of just eleven sites selected to host this program. The SPARK program specifically selects students who represent the diversity of California's population, and this is true of our first cohort: four students from Imperial Valley and eight from San Diego. Our SPARK students spent their summers conducting six-week research internships in labs on our campus and at the Sanford Consortium. On the last day of their program, they showed off their hard work by presenting their research findings at our Institute’s annual Intern Celebration, and the week after, they traveled to Oakland, CA for a two-day symposium involving >100 SPARK students from all eleven internship sites.