Tamanika Ferguson: Reclaiming the Future Junior Tamanika Ferguson serves as a volunteer at Mentoring A Touch Above, a nonprofit organization that helps youth in the juvenile courts and the California Youth Authority facilities make the transition back into mainstream society upon their release. A nominee for the William Randolph Hearst/CSU Trustees’ Award, Ferguson brings her own experiences to counseling these young people, having dropped out of high school for a life on the streets, which resulted in her own detainment and probation as a teenager.

Photo above: The Minority Biomedical Research Support (MBRS) Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE) program at CSU Dominguez Hills is funded by the National Institutes of Health,
part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This year, the program's funding was renewed,supporting 12 students at about $320,000 a year for four years, or nearly $1.3 million total.

The program supports development of the biomedical research potential of underrepresented students from the departments of biology, chemistry, physics and psychology. Students are selected and placed with faculty from CSUDH, the Los Angeles Biomedical
Research Institute, or the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, who are conducting biomedical research projects.The grant will be used to pay salaries to students for their work in the labs, as well as for travel expenses for students attending educational conferences and presenting research. It will also fund a variety of workshops, including bioinformatics, scientific writing, and psychology.

Students pictured (L-R) Front row: Senior Breyon Clemmons (Psychology); senior Onyeka Uzomah (Biology); junior
Christi Huffman (Psychology); senior Julissa Castaneda (Biology); and senior Sylvia Bonilla.

Back row: Senior Jennell Plummer (Psychology); senior
Marvin Malone (Chemistry); junior Abraham Gallegos (Biology); junior Jazmyn Marquez (Biology); senior Erick Medina (Biology); and sophomore Steve Martinez (Chemistry). Not pictured: senior Cheyenne Cummings (Psychology). Photo by Joanie Harmon