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2009 Early Career Professional Service Awardee
Rudy M. Ortiz, Ph.D.
University of California, Merced
The APS Trainee Advisory Committee is pleased to
announce that Rudy M. Ortiz, Assistant Professor of Natural Science at the
University of California, Merced, has been selected as the second recipient
of the APS Early Career Professional Service Award. The Committee was
extremely impressed with his outstanding service contributions at all
levels, from K-12 to undergraduate to graduate to postdoctoral education.
Dr. Ortiz has been very active both inside and outside APS, foremost as a
mentor and trainer and also as a committee, task force, and advisory board
member; session organizer and presenter; and reviewer. He has done service
and outreach on a K-12, undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, and new
investigator level.
In the K-12 arena, Ortiz has been a career panelist for the APS High School
Teacher/Student workshop at Experimental Biology and has served as
Physiologist-in-Residence for the APS Frontiers Science Teaching Forum. In
his own community, he speaks to local grade school classes on health and
nutrition.
Ortiz has mentored over 30 undergraduate and graduate students, especially
under-represented minority students, in his own laboratory at Merced and
also at scientific meetings. He has been a meeting mentor to over 10
undergraduate and graduate students at EB and Society for Native Americans
and Chicanos in Science (SACNAS). He sponsors undergraduates to conduct
research in Japan and then acts as their mentor, as well as serving as a
mentor to the Japanese students. He served as a faculty panelist while also
taking three of his own students to the APS Undergraduate Physiology
Explorations Retreat. He has served as a poster judge for the Bruce
Excellence in Undergraduate Research Awards during EB and been the featured
speaker at the NIDDK Minority Travel Fellows luncheon.
Ortiz is committed to training the next generation of physiologists. He
served on the Professional Skills Training Project Advisory Board and was
instrumental is helping develop both PST courses to meet the needs of
underrepresented graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. He also
participated as one of the speakers for both courses. He developed and
implemented an abstract writing symposium for the SACNAS annual meeting that
now stands as an integral component of their professional skills training
workshops. While serving as an inaugural member of the Trainee Advisory
Committee, Ortiz organized their first symposium and selected the topic to
be “Transition from Postdoc to Jr. Faculty.” The symposium was so
successful, it was standing room only.
In addition to his service on the Trainee Advisory Committee, Ortiz is or
has been a member of the Porter Physiology Development Committee, APS
Meetings Task Force, and Comparative & Evolutionary Physiology Section
Steering Committee. Importantly he was one of select number of trainees who
were asked to participate in the 2005 APS Strategic Planning Retreat. He was
also selected to serve on the State of California Legislator’s Task Force on
Childhood Diabetes and Obesity as the University of California, Merced
representative and is a member of the Merced Chapter of the Central
California Regional Obesity Prevention Program.
Ortiz serves on many scientific review panels, including several for other
national and state societies. He is the chair of the university’s graduate
program Education Policy Committee and is a member of their Institutional
Animal Care & Use, Life Sciences Curriculum, and faculty search Committees.
APS congratulates Dr. Ortiz this well-deserved
recognition.
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