Inamori Fellows Receive Scholarships

Each year as part of the Kyoto Prize Symposium, sponsored by the Inamori Foundation and held at San Diego State University, a group of SDSU graduate students are selected as Inamori Fellows. The foundation was established in 1984 by Kazuo Inamori, founder and chairman of Kyocera and KDDI Corporation. As part of the fellowship, the 10 honorees each receive a $5,000 scholarship.

Each of the recipients has an SDSU faculty adviser or mentor who has recommended them; scholarly accomplishments such as awards, publications and presentations; and have committed time to focus on research and the pursuit of their degree.

The 2015-16 Inamori Fellows are:

College of Arts and Letters

Originally from Taiwan, Jiue-An (Jay) Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography. He received his master’s degree in geography at State University of New York, Buffalo and his bachelor's degree in geography from National Taiwan University. 

His research interests include location-based social networks, big geo-data analytics and spatio-temporal visualization. In the last few years, he has been focused on understanding the relations between human behavior and space/place with crowdsourcing social media. Yang has presented his research at professional conferences in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Chelsea E. Hunter is a Master of Arts student in applied anthropology with a focus on environmental anthropology. As an undergrad, Hunter received her Bachelor of Arts in anthropology from Portland State University in 2013. She created and taught an undergraduate level course and participated in an internship that collaborated with Native American Nations and Federal Agencies in Nevada.

She published her senior capstone research on cocoa farming sustainability in Ghana, West Africa, and presented this project at multiple national conferences. While pursuing her graduate degree, she has conducted research in both the Solomon Islands and on Mo’orea, French Polynesia.

Her master's thesis is focused on how multiple stakeholders in coral-reef environments in Mo’orea differentially value marine resources and how we can incorporate these values into marine conservation projects. In this project and her career goals, Hunter seeks to contribute to more equitable environmental conservation programs, incorporating local uses of ecosystems into conservation projects. 

Binh H. Nguyen studied literature and creative writing with the poet Jim Crenner at Hobart College, where he founded and edited SCRY! A Nexus of Politics and the Arts. His poems and essays appear in several publications.

He was a semi-finalist in the 2015 Joy Harjo Poetry Contest. In addition, Binh conducted an interview with the American novelist-poet Katherine Towler and co-translated the poems of Mario Bojórquez for Poetry International. He also writes theatre reviews for The San Diego Reader. Nguyen is currently working on his Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry writing.

College of Education

Originally from Peru, Katherine Vilchez is a Master of Counseling Science candidate. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Spanish literature and sociology from the University of California, San Diego and traveled to Peru where she studied at a language school and cultural center. Her passion for the empowerment of all oppressed peoples developed as she learned about the resilience and strength of her own culture.

Vilchez has focused her work on guiding youth from marginalized backgrounds through different institutions toward the pursuit of lives with dignity, social awareness and critical thinking. She’s contributed to the research and scholarly representation of San Diego incarcerated youth struggling with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and severe substance abuse.  She’s worked with several programs to provide college-bound services for low income, first generation and minority high school students. 

College of Engineering

Diletta Giuntini is currently a Ph.D. candidate in engineering sciences in the joint doctoral program between SDSU and University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on mechanics and materials science, with an emphasis on advanced powder technologies.

She is originally from Italy, where she received her bachelor's and master's degrees in aerospace engineering at the University of Pisa. Her passion for materials mechanics developed during her earliest engineering studies, and has been increasingly growing at the SDSU Powder Technology Laboratory, where she works with professor Eugene Olevsky, fellow Ph.D. and master's students and collaborators from all over the world.

Giuntini has more than 10 papers published, submitted or prepared for publication in scientific journals, and has presented her work at a number of international conferences. She hopes to build an academic career with a significant contribution to the scientific and education community.

College of Health and Human Services

Nathan Alamillo is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Joint Doctoral Program in public health (health behavior track) at SDSU and UCSD. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a bachelor's in sociology.

As a first-generation college student, Alamillo distinguished himself as a promising researcher through his involvement in the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program. His first research project, under the direction of sociologist Victor Rios, examined the ways in which young Latino men in the local community perceived drug use as well as how their social identity and lifestyle was stigmatized, criminalized and punished. This paper was published last year in the UCSB McNair Scholars Research Journal.

During the summer of 2013, Alamillo was selected as an intern for the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He worked with epidemiologist Nanlesta Pilgrim on a systematic literature review that assessed the relationship between the family environment and HIV risk factors among young people residing in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the summer of 2014, Alamillo continued his work with Pilgrim as a UCSB McNair Scholar, investigating trends in family demography experienced by young people residing in rural Rakai, Uganda.

Alamillo is also the recipient of a National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded research-training grant. As a pre-doctoral fellow, he will be working under the direction of Susan Kiene, Steffanie Strathdee and Thomas Patterson on a global health project that examines sexual risk behaviors among drug-using populations residing along the United States-Mexico border. Nathan will be designing, implementing and evaluating intervention programs that aim to minimize health-compromising behaviors associated with HIV/AIDS and co-morbidities among injection drug users. 

College of Sciences

Shadi Gholizadeh is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at the SDSU/UCSD joint doctoral program. She is concurrently pursuing her Master’s in Public Health at SDSU. She resides in San Diego but is originally from Tehran, Iran. Her research interests include quality of life in chronic illness, body image in scleroderma, and the use of psychological assessments in forensic settings.

Gholizadeh has degrees from Stanford University and the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is pursuing her doctoral degree under the mentorship of Vanessa Malcarne, who is the director of SDSU's Chronic Illness Research Laboratory. 

Megan Morris is a doctoral student in ecology with SDSU and the University of California, Davis. She received her Bachelor's of Science from SDSU in 2011, and also attended SDSU in the ecology master’s program.

As a Ph.D. student in the microbial ecology lab of Elizabeth Dinsdale, she studies the microbes living in the kelp forests off the coast of San Diego. Her research is describing the changes that occur in the coastal microbes caused by human influences, and she is investigating how altered microbes affect the health of kelp. The goal of Morris' research is to describe the interactions of the microbes and kelp health, to provide a more complete model of the kelp forest ecosystems.

Duyen Trang is a Master of Arts student in the Department of Psychology. She is currently conducting research at the Child and Adolescent Services Research Center under the primary mentorship of May Yeh, and she is also receiving an additional research experience with Joseph Price. Trang is highly interested in learning about mental health issues in underserved populations with hopes of reducing mental health disparities and enhancing culturally competent mental health services.

Her research has resulted in poster and oral presentations at regional and national conferences and her passion and efforts culminated in a recent co-authored publication, “Sociocultural Factors and Parent Therapist Agreement on Explanatory Etiologies for Youth Mental Health Problems.”

As a first-generation college student, Trang understands the importance of having a mentor for academic and professional guidance. She aspires to pursue a research teaching career to improve mental health services and mentor future students.

Pierre Winter is a Master of Chemistry candidate. Originally from France, Winter has now lived in Southern California for eight years and received his Bachelor of Science in chemistry from University of California, Irvine. He worked in the medical device industry for two years where he developed hydrophobic polymers to be used in treating aneurysms and arteriovenous malformation in humans. His current research focuses on exploring the thermodynamics and kinetics of hydrocarbon combustion intermediates using ab initio computational methods.

Winter has given talks and poster presentations on his research at the American Chemical Society conferences in Boston and San Diego. He is also a leading author on three manuscripts. He collaborates with organic chemists at the University of Southern California and inorganic chemists at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

SDSU's Inamori Fellowship Program

Any degree-seeking SDSU graduate student whose adviser is an SDSU faculty member may compete for an Inamori Fellowship. Applicants must have at least two semesters remaining in their program.

The application deadline for the program usually ends in October and awards are announced in early December.