Stanford makes community college connections
By Lisa Chung
Isabel Caballero Texeira, a De Anza College student studying biology, said she was “terrified-excited” when she was selected last spring for an internship through the Neuroscience Undergraduate Research Opportunity (NeURO) program at Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. “I was just not very confident,” she said. She considered not attending.
But as the end of the program approached, her courses and work with neurology Assistant Professor Paul George nearly complete, Caballero Teixeira described the summer as a success. “The classes provided by the NeURO program really have helped me to be able to digest the information. It’s very, very empowering,” she said as she bent over trays of cells in the School of Medicine Lab Surge Building, filling a pipette with media in order to maintain cells that are used in stroke research.
Her experience is part of a growing set of collaborations between Stanford University and the region’s many community colleges that provide unique academic experiences for community college students. Such programs reflect Stanford’s commitment to ensuring equity and inclusion in research and on campus, and to engaging with partners to learn from and give back to the local community.