People | Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program at UC Davis

Alex Garcia Arango

Neuroscience PhD Program, University of Washington

Alex Garcia joins PREP@UCDavis from UC Santa Barbara, graduating with a degree in Biopsychology. Previously he studied how eye movements changed with age and even sleep deprivation at NASA Ames to develop better diagnostic tools. As an undergraduate, he completed a senior thesis addressing the question of how the Orbitofrontal cortex is involved in context-dependent learning. At UC Davis he will join the Wilsaan Joiner lab to study how limbs coordinate to accomplish a goal, thus gaining insight into how the brain learns and adapts new motor movements.

Arielle Hancko

Molecular Engineering PhD Program, University of Washington
NSF GRFP Fellow

Arielle Hancko earned her BS in Bioengineering from the University of California San Diego in 2022. Arielle's interests center around engineering therapeutics that function on the cellular level for chronic diseases and disorders. Her undergraduate research focused on biomaterial-aided cardiac tissue engineering. She now studies neuropharmacology in the Jennifer Whistler lab where she investigates mechanisms of interaction between drugs of abuse and cell receptors that relate to drug seeking tendencies and drug tolerance.

Kiya Jackson

Cell and Developmental Biology PhD Program, UCLA

Kiya Jackson graduated from UC Davis in June 2022 with a BS in Biological Sciences. As an undergraduate, she conducted research as an NSF LSAMP/CAMP and RSPIB scholar in the lab of Dr. Joanna Chiu, where she studied post-translational regulation of circadian rhythms. As a PREP@UCD scholar, she will be working with Dr. Alex Nord.

Julianna Porter

Julianna Porter graduated from UC Davis in June 2022 with a BS in Genetics and Genomics. As an undergraduate she worked in the Ross-Ibarra lab and received the Nieland Award to conduct full-time research in the summer of 2021. Her work examined genome size variation due to repeat abundance as local adaptation to altitude. She is currently working in the lab of Dr. Rachael Bay as a PREP@UCD affiliate. Her research uses copy number variants to investigate a recent geographical range expansion following a marine heatwave in the owl limpet, Lottia gigantea.

Angel Ruiz

Cell and Developmental Biology PhD Program, UCLA

Angel Ruiz received his BS in Biochemistry from California State University, Long Beach in May 2022. As an undergraduate, he conducted research as an NIH-funded BUILD Fellow in Dr. Fangyuan Tian's material science laboratory. His focus on metal organic frameworks as a drug delivery system for prospective heart therapeutics culminated in the presentation of a senior thesis. At UC Davis, he joined Dr. JoAnne Engebrecht’s laboratory to study meiosis and tumor-suppressor genes in germline cells using C. elegans as a model organism.

Johnny Vertiz

Cell and Molecular Biology PhD Program, UC Irvine
NSF GRFP Fellow

Johnny Vertiz graduated from California State University, Northridge in May 2022 with a BS in Cellular and Molecular Biology. He conducted research at CSUN as a Build PODER scholar in the lab of Ray Hong, where he studied host finding behaviors in nematodes at the molecular and genetic level. Specifically, he studied how neuronal inhibition impacted a nematodes chemo-sensation. As a PREP scholar, he will work with Crystal Rogers to study how environmental factors can impact embryonic development.

Claudia Wang

University of Michigan PREP

Claudia Wang joined PREP as an undergraduate affiliate. She graduated in Spring 2023 with a BS in Genetics and Genomics from the University of California, Davis. She did undergraduate research in Dr. Henry Ho's Lab and studied the Wnt5a-Ror developmental signaling pathway implicated in a human disorder called Robinow Syndrome. Her research focuses on the underlying mechanisms of Wnt5a signal transduction, specifically the molecular interaction between the ligand Wnt5a and receptor Ror to facilitate proper signaling.

2022-2023 Cohort