Student Profile

Carlos Penaloza
One would be hard-pressed to find a better example of the value of programs such as the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (AMP), Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC), and Bridges to the Doctorate for Minority Master’s Students than Carlos Penaloza.

Predestined to pursue a career in medicine, Penaloza, a 2005 QC graduate in biology who transferred from Queensborough Community College, credits these programs and the inspiration of his mentor, Zahra Zakeri (Biology), with helping him find his passion: biomedical research.

“My dad’s a dentist and my whole family in Venezuela are in medical fields, so medicine was sort of pressured into me a long while ago,” explains Penaloza, who immigrated to the United States with his mother and stepfather in December 1999, settling in Richmond Hill. A semester shy of graduation, he completed his high school education at John Adams High School in Ozone Park.

“It was a matter of a lot of mentoring from Dr. Zakeri, followed by a lot of clinical experiences in programs like the Bridges Program, MARC, AMP. All of these allowed me to experience research in different areas, as well as go to different places like the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and visit some labs and some really cool people,” says Penaloza.

“I had satisfied all the prerequisites for a medical career, including volunteering,” he says, referring to time spent working at Elmhurst Hospital and a private cardiology clinic. “But these research experiences changed my mind entirely.”

So much so, that Penaloza, by his own admission, spends virtually all of his time in the lab. “My schedule is usually I’m here between 9 am and 10 until . . . lately it’s been until almost midnight,” he says. “My life outside of school is all school-related; anything I do outside of school is with school people.”

Penaloza is passing along his passion for research to four undergraduates he is currently mentoring, some of whom are in the MARC and AMP programs that inspired him to undertake research science.

“I carried over some of the research that I did as an undergrad in Dr. Zakeri’s lab. I’m working on sex differences at the cellular level. I’m doing cell molecular and developmental biology. All of the students I have been working with I’m training through my project. We’re combining all of our data for the research.

“My goal is research/academia, with a big accent on the academia,” he says. “I like to teach, but I also enjoy doing my little experiments and having fun. My goal is to be like Dr. Zakeri, having both the research and the teaching.”

Penaloza says he would prefer to stay in the public school system where he believes researchers have more freedom than at large private schools. When asked if he would be happy to find a position at Queens College, he unhesitatingly responds: “Absolutely.”