Graduate Student Success

This year's cohort of fellows includes students and postdoctoral scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines and graduate programs.  In this three-part spotlight series, we'll be getting to know our PFTF fellows and their projects.

Irene Yim, a second-year Ph.D. student in food science and technology, brings a particular zest to her research in food safety: an impressive professional cooking background.

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Yim spent her childhood helping in her family’s restaurants and attended the California Culinary Academy Le Cordon Bleu in San Francisco after high school.

She spent the next decade cooking for esteemed restaurants in the Bay Area and beyond: Thailand, Singapore and New Orleans.

Without excellent faculty mentors at both the undergrad and graduate levels, assisting with research, funding and sheer encouragement, Gail Bornhorst is certain she would not be where she is now: an assistant professor in Biological & Agricultural Engineering. Since turnabout is fair play, she strives to be as effective a mentor for her graduate students, now also her mentees, Yamile Govela and Krista Drechsler, both in biological systems engineering.

Kent Leach, professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering (BME) and Orthopedic Surgery, was a first-generation college student. He remembers the struggle to find guidance throughout his developing academic career. “To this day, my parents still scratch their head as to why I turned down jobs after graduating from college, much less pursue graduate school and a postdoc,” he says.  “I was certainly learning what I wanted as I went along.”

As an undergraduate student and a first-generation college graduate, Terry Nathan assumed he would follow a traditional career path once he obtained his graduate degree in atmospheric science. Becoming a university professor never even occurred to him, until his graduate thesis advisor, who demonstrated by example the importance of mentorship, introduced the possibility of a university career.

In the near-decade that Annaliese Franz has mentored both graduate and undergraduate students through her research lab, she’s seen an evolution of change, impact, and challenges. “We place an immense significance on mentoring, yet the word can be used differently by many people, and so the concept can become vague,” she says.

When UC Davis alum Carol A. Hess was offered a professorship of music at UC Davis, it was little wonder that she was a Target of Excellence hire: In the early 1990s, Hess had been UC Davis’s first PhD in musicology. “I was thrilled to return to such a fine department and to work with PhD students, which I hadn't done in my previous positions,” she says.