Socrates Fellows Our Projects Physics Rosa Leon-Zayas
“Mentoring and teaching have been a passion of mine for many years,” says Socrates Fellow Rosa Leon-Zayas, a native of Puerto Rico. “ Early in my college career, I began working with high school and middle students, teaching them science and encouraging them to pursue studies at the college level. I gave workshops on biotechnology and general biology to students who were in the process of choosing their university major.”
A graduate of the University of Puerto Rico (Mayaguez Campus) where she earned her B.S. degree in Industrial Biotechnology, Rosa entered the graduate program in Marine Biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2007 where she is studying under Dr. Doug Bartlett.
While at the University of Puerto Rico, Rosa became a mentor at the Biotechnology Summer Camp in Mayaguez, helping to develop the curriculum and program logistics.“It was inspiring to see how high school students became captivated with science and how this affects their goals for the future,” says Rosa who also as an undergrad completed summer research projects in laboratories at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Rutgers University. As a Socrates Fellow, she hopes to continue to draw upon such experiences “to become a mentor for other students, especially minorities.”
Her research at SIO involves studying how various organisms survive under extremely high pressures in the deep sea. “For instance,” she explains, “at 10,000 feet below the ocean, the pressure of the water that we as humans would feel would be similar to that of the entire NFL and NBA teams piled on top of us while we were trying to breath. Amazingly, there are sea organisms that have adapted to such high pressure and can live happily in that environment.”
