LOS ANGELES, June 9 (AScribe Newswire) -- From age 12, when each school year ended, Elma Gonzalez and her family spent the summer picking crops: cotton, cucumbers, tomatoes and cherries.
"We worked from sun up to sun down," said Gonzalez, a UCLA professor of biology, who has taught at UCLA for nearly 30 years. "We went from Texas to Nebraska to Wisconsin to Illinois."
Her father, a day laborer, expected her to drop out of school after eight years, but she had other plans, and became the first member of her family to go to college.
"People ask me how I made it, and I've wondered about that," Gonzalez said, "because I wasn't special. There were a lot of kids I left behind who were smarter than I was, and they didn't make it. I'm a very ordinary person, but a little bit tougher, a little bit more persistent. You have to be persistent."
Gonzalez, a cell biologist, has been involved for more than 25 years in programs that help minority students succeed in scientific research careers. She is director of UCLA's Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) program, funded by the National Institutes of Health to support 11 UCLA undergraduates each year, who receive money to support their education and research.
Recent graduates of the program have gone on to graduate school at Harvard, Yale and other top universities.
"These students are exceptional," Gonzalez said. "They begin to think of themselves as real scientists."
No one encouraged Gonzalez to pursue education or science.
She vividly recalls going for an interview at the University of Texas when she was evaluating graduate schools.
"The first professor I ran into told me maybe I shouldn't be thinking about a Ph.D. because I was female," she said. "Wasn't I going to get married and have kids? What use was a Ph.D. going to be? This was the prevalent attitude. Mexicans and women weren't expected to go any place."
She didn't let that discourage her. Where did she find her motivation, and determination?
"I read a lot - biographies, Russian literature, everything the county library had," Gonzalez said. "The stories by (Anton) Chekhov fascinated me; all these aristocrats, people with money and property and no barriers, were living such useless lives. They were drowning in teacups."
Gonzalez was born in Mexico, walking distance from the U.S. Texas border, and grew up in a small town in South Texas. She went to college at Texas Woman's University, where she majored in biology and chemistry, and to New Jersey for graduate school at Rutgers University, where she earned her Ph.D. in cell biology.
"It was lonely," she remembers about Rutgers, "but I learned a lot. I wanted to be away from home, and to see how other people lived. I wasn't inspired by the lives of the people I knew back home."
She joined UCLA's faculty in 1974.
"All these professors I had read about and hero-worshipped were now my colleagues," she said. "You wonder how you can live up to their stature, but I try to live life as if everything is possible."
As UCLA's director of the MARC program, she participates in selecting the MARC students, counsels them, and teaches a course for the students each spring on new scientific research, where they make presentations.
How would Gonzalez have liked to be in a program like MARC when she was a student?
"It would have been a wonderful fantasy," said Gonzalez, who is delighted to give students the opportunity that was not available to her.
"There are so many very bright students, and so much potential that is often untapped," she said. "The lack of support or money or opportunities conspires to keep kids from achieving their potential. I have learned that there are opportunities, but you have to be tough and persevere. You can't get discouraged easily or accept the first negative."
Gonzalez conducts research on a single-cell organism called Emilinania huxleyii, frequently found in sub-polar oceans, and a member of coccolithophorid phytoplankton (unicellular algae).
CONTACTS:
Stuart Wolpert or Harlan Lebo, UCLA Media Relations,
310-206-0511, stuartw@college.ucla.edu or
hlebo@college.ucla.edu
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