Congratulations to Iván Olaya!
Iván Olaya, a UC Davis alumnus and PREP@UCD scholar from our founding cohort, has received an IRACDA postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA!
The UCLA IRACDA program awards postdoctoral fellowships to scholars who have demonstrated interest in academic careers and promoting DEI in STEM disciplines. In addition to mentored research, the program supports its fellows with training in pedagogy and a faculty-mentored teaching experience at partner institution CSULA.
I am incredibly committed to becoming an effective educator so that I can improve the quality of undergraduate education and the IRACDA program is the next important step to that career path.
Iván will join Patrick Allard's lab to study how environmental exposures can affect reproductive health across generations. Specifically, Iván will examine ethanol's transgenerational effects on reproduction and how it changes the germline epigenome of C. elegans.
As a PREP scholar and graduate student in the UC Davis Graduate Program in Integrative Genetics and Genomics, Iván studied chromosome pairing in zebrafish meiosis in the lab of Sean Burgess. He uses garden variety model organisms in his research, but readily admits that his favorite critters are cephalopods, with cuttlefish topping the list.
Perhaps in his future career as a Professor of Teaching, Iván will be able to share the fascinating biology of these super cool organisms with his students.
We're proud of you, Iván, and celebrate your success!