a closer look at the back story of a big nih award
The First Big Award Amariliz Rivera, PhD, wears many hats at the medical school. As an integral member of the Institute for Infectious and Inflammatory Diseases (i3D), she heads-up a lab studying fungal infections, lectures on immunity and the host defense to NJMS and GSBS students, serves on thesis defense committees, publishes research papers, and continues to write new grant proposals to support her investigations.
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BY EVE JACOBS
he distance from the small mountain town of Lares, Puerto Rico, to the cosmopolitan West Coast city of Mayaguez is just 18 miles as the crow flies. But for Amariliz Rivera, that short journey— from hometown to university— proved transformative in all of the usual, and some unusual, ways. The biology major, who thought she was headed to a career in medicine, was one of just five students hand-picked to participate in the first Minority Access to Research Careers program at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez, which provided her with financial support for all four college years, 6
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a mentor to guide her progress, and experiences she had never even dreamed of. “I took extra classes, had hands-on training and research experiences, changed my major to microbiology,” she says, “and found out that I love working in a lab.” It certainly isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time to perform manual DNA sequencing to study the telomeres of Drosophila (the common fruit fly), but for Rivera it was “a great time.” Her 10 weeks in the summer of 1992 spent working in the lab of Mary-Lou Pardue, PhD, an internationally recognized geneticist, cell-biologist, and then-chair of the department of microbiology at the Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), cemented her career decision. “By the end of that summer, I knew for-sure that I wanted to do a PhD.” And when she was ready to apply to doctoral programs, her stand-out talent, once again, did not go unnoticed. Rivera was singled out for a minority training program at UMDNJ (now Rutgers) Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBS) in Piscataway by Michael Liebowitz, MD, PhD, director of Graduate Academic Diversity, who was visiting the Mayaguez campus to recruit students underrepresented in the field of biomedical research. She came to New Jersey in the summer right after graduation from college, initially training in Liebowitz’s lab. “GSBS was a very good fit,” she says. After rotating through three labs as part of her first year in graduate school, Rivera joined the research team of Yakov Ron, PhD, a professor of pharmacology, to study autoimmunity in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis. “Our work focused on gaining a better understanding of how the immune system attacks the body and coming up with potential therapeutic avenues — to modify the autoimmune process,” she explains. For 10 years — from 1993 to 2003 — she persevered. “These were challenging times for technical reasons,” she says. “This work takes persistence, and you can’t quit when it doesn’t work out.” Throughout, Rivera applied and won NIH fellowship and post-doctoral fellowship awards for qualified minorities. “I would not have made it without that financial support,” she says. She had planned to return to Puerto Rico after earning her doctoral degree to become a professor at a small undergraduate college and do some research on the side. However, during graduate school she met her husband and also fell in love with New Jersey. “It feels like home to me,” she says. Her husband, Michael Correa, MD, a graduate of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, is an internist with a solo practice in Morningside Heights, and they have two sons, Samuel and David, ages 10 and 7. PHOTOS BY JOHN EMERSON
