Fewer than 3 percent of former foster youth graduate from a four-year college, according to the National Foster Youth Institute. Estefania Sinay Pacheco is defying those odds – and she’s working to help others do the same. (She uses Sinay as her last name.)
When she’s not studying or working, she’s inspiring foster youth, first-generation and undocumented students to succeed.
When a 4-year-old boy coming to the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center for another session of treatment had a meltdown and refused to come inside, Jenny Belke knew just what to do. She sat Huggie, a 3-year-old black Labrador, in front of a window where the boy could see him and ran outside.
“Have you seen Huggie? I can’t find him!” she recalled telling the boy, who calmed down to help look for the beloved facility dog, quickly spotting him through the window. When another staffer lured the dog away from the window, the boy followed.
This Global Disease Biology major is driven deeply to help others, even among the most harrowing of circumstances. Joseph Laughlin is a Navy veteran who worked as a hospital corpsman, a military medical specialist. For more than two years of his enlistment, Laughlin was attached to a Marine unit in Afghanistan and helped provide primary care for 80 Marines, sometimes in the midst of combat situations.
Kristin Aquilino is respected worldwide for her research at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory where she is working to rescue white abalone from the brink of extinction. In fact, just this month, hundreds of the lab’s white abalone were released into the ocean as part of an 11-year collaboration between Aquilino’s team at the BML, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and others.
Perhaps the best way to sum up Professor Jonathan Eisen’s philosophy is to note his belief that “it is important to fix that which is easily fixable.”
Eisen, who has appointments in the Genome Center, the Department of Evolution and Ecology, and the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, “uses his powers of national influence for good,” according to his Aggie Hero nominator.
