Ten SDSU students were selected as Inamori Fellows as part of the Kyoto Prize Symposium.
Each year as part of the Kyoto Prize Symposium, an event sponsored by the Inamori Foundation and held at San Diego State University, 10 SDSU graduate and Ph.D. students are selected as Inamori Fellows and receive $5,000 scholarships.
SDSU faculty advisers and mentors recommend the recipients, whose resumes include awards, publications and presentations.
The scholarship foundation was established in 1984 by Kazuo Inamori, founder and chairman of Kyocera and KDDI Corporation.
The following are the 2017-18 Inamori Fellows:
Haley Ciborowski, Global Health
Ciborowski’s research interests include social determinants of health, access to primary care, and infectious disease testing and treatment access for rural indigenous populations, marginalized populations, and people living in border and migration areas and areas of conflict.
Hannes Schraft, Biology
Schraft’s research surrounds the behavior and sensory ecology of rattlesnakes. His work examines the resolution and sensitivity of the organs rattlesnakes use to “see” heat and how wild rattlesnakes use thermal information to make behavioral decisions.
Jeanette Zambrano, Psychology
Zambrano plans to pursue her doctoral degree in urban education policy with a concentration in educational psychology at the University of Southern California.
Jie Dai, Geography
Dai’s research uses satellite imagery and species distribution modeling frameworks to study the spatial extent of an invasive vine in Chitwan community forests, Nepal. His work also examines the interactions and dynamics of the Chitwan local communities in the face of exotic plant invasion.
Karen Schwartz, Psychology
Schwartz ultimately hopes to use her findings to develop and implement more efficacious intervention programs for this in-need population.
Michael Verrier, Homeland Security
His current research involves initiating a grassroots effort for volunteer humanitarian mapping through Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in Indonesia and investigating the potential for crowdsourced mapping to measure the United Nation’s indicators of sustainable development.
Nazanin Abbaspour, Exercise and Nutrition
She has authored seven papers in international Scientific Indexing (ISI) journals, including two highly-cited review papers on the importance of zinc and iron to human health. Her research explores the impact of climate change on California water resources.
Alma Behar, Public Health
Behar’s long-term goal is to contribute, through research and advocacy, to the development of physical activity-related programs that improve the health outcomes of young underserved populations in the United States and abroad.
Bingyan J. Wang, Biology
Wang’s interest in developmental biology eventually brought her San Diego, where she was able to join Mark Sussman’s research lab—part of SDSU’s Heart Institute. Her current research examines the connection between cardiac stem cell behavior and the myocardial microenvironment during embryogenesis and early postnatal heart development, in order to engineer permissive conditions to facilitate stem cell therapy for heart failure.
Jazzalyn Livingston, Counseling and School Psychology
Following her undergraduate studies, she traveled Greece to study the pharmacology of psychoactive drugs, addictive behavior, therapeutics and neuroscience. From this experience, she was inspired to further her education in the field of community mental health.
Her past research includes work with formerly incarcerated individuals from southeast San Diego, who have been impacted by the prison industrial complex. The project implemented a trauma-informed intervention designed to help participants clarify their values, improve everyday functioning, enhance their sense of self and interconnection with others and the community, while ultimately learning skills they could use to successfully divert the cycle of recidivism.