Scholarship support aids Rider science student aiming for research career

It takes inspiration, motivation and collaboration to be a scientist. Biology major Luis Ovando has all that, plus another key element: potential.

As a McNair Scholar at Rider University, Ovando is working hard, and his perseverance is leading him toward graduate studies and a career studying bacteriology or virology.

Growing up in Belleville, N.J., he faced a future that didn’t seem nearly as bright. A quiet child who kept to himself, he was raised in a single parent household where money was tight. He often would be responsible for his younger siblings while his mother, an immigrant from Guatemala, worked — first as a housekeeper and in later years in a factory.

“Before I came to Rider, I was timid,” Ovando says. “After I came to the University, I have slowly become more independent and more comfortable getting up before a class and making presentations. I am not afraid of making a connection, and I have become much more of a leader.”

Ovando says the confidence and direction he’s developed since arriving on campus is helping to shape his goals and overcome feelings of shyness, enabling him to become a mentor to other students, a leader in his fraternity, a speaker at events and a volunteer big brother with the Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization.

Since his freshman year, the University has awarded him a Provost Scholarship and other financial aid through the Educational Opportunity Program, a state-sponsored program that helps low-income New Jersey residents attend college. Now a junior, Ovando was named a McNair Scholar at the end of his sophomore year. “Without the help of the Provost Scholarship and going through EOP, I never would have gotten the chance to be a student at Rider,” he says.

As a McNair scholar, Ovando receives in-depth academic advisement and one-on-one faculty support for student research opportunities. The national fellowship program is for academically talented students from low-income, first-generation and historically underrepresented backgrounds for the pursuit of doctoral studies. Its scholars from Rider have gone on to doctoral programs at some of this country’s most prestigious institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown and Vanderbilt. Their achievements honor the memory of Ronald E. McNair, the physicist and NASA mission specialist astronaut who died in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

Thanks to the knowledge the program provides, Ovando is aware of what it takes to get into a top-tier graduate school program, and one of those requirements is lab experience. He is researching the diversity of microbial species present on Rider's campus using a combined approach of standard cultivation and modern molecular techniques. To accomplish this, he collects environmental samples from soils and the lake on campus and isolates DNA for sequence analysis. From this information, he is able to identify all of the microbial species present to ascertain the overall health of these environments. He hopes his work will lead to a poster presentation at a national conference and a published paper.

His research project, coupled with the experience he has gained in the laboratory of Associate Dean and Professor of Biology Dr. Kelly Bidle, is bringing him one step closer to his dream job as a microbiologist at either the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization.

At Rider, Ovando says he has found a solid foundation on which to realize his potential: professors who are mentors, fraternity brothers who challenge him with contests to see who can get the best grade on exams, and a close network of friends who support and encourage him.

“I appreciate the help I have gotten from Rider,” Ovando says. “It has pushed me forward.”