Meet three M&I graduate students who received prestigious fellowships from U-M Rackham Graduate School

Faith Anderson, Jaime Fuentes, and Andrés Rivera Ruiz, M&I Ph.D. candidates, have been awarded prestigious fellowships from Rackham Graduate School, in recognition of their academic excellence. Congratulations, we’re so proud of you!

The Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship (RPF)

The Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship (RPF) supports outstanding doctoral students who have achieved candidacy and are actively working on dissertation research and writing. The fellows are selected for working on dissertations that are unusually creative, ambitious, and impactful. The fellowship provides three terms of support that may begin with spring/summer or fall term 2024.

Left to right, Jaime Fuentes, Faith Anderson and Andrés Rivera Ruiz

In M&I, Faith Anderson received a 2023–2024 Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship.

Faith Anderson researches interactions between the fungal pathogen, Candida albicans, and gastrointestinal-colonizing bacteria in the O’Meara lab. She has demonstrated that a bacterial metabolite induces fungal cell wall remodeling, and this remodeling has downstream consequences for immune recognition and virulence factors of C. albicans. Anderson was previously supported by the Molecular Mechanisms in Microbial Pathogenesis (MMMP) T32 training grant. Anderson graduated with a B.S. in Microbiology from Auburn University, in 2019. Outside the lab, Anderson previously served as President for the Organization of Microbiology and Immunology (OMIS) and actively volunteers as a review and copy editor for the Journal of Emerging Investigators (JEI).

The Rackham Merit Fellowship (RMF)

The Rackham Merit Fellowship (RMF) helps sustain the academic excellence and inclusiveness of the Michigan graduate community, one that embraces students with diverse experiences and goals, and who come from many educational, cultural, geographic, and familial backgrounds. By offering this named prestigious fellowship to students, Rackham Graduate School aims to promote the values of diversity and inclusion by encouraging the admission of students who represent a broad array of life experiences and perspectives, because this enhances the quality of the intellectual environment for all students. 

In M&I, Jaime Fuentes received a Rackham Merit Fellowship in 2018, and Andrés Rivera Ruiz received one in 2021.

Jaime Fuentes investigates the role of Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron phase-variable surface proteins (S-layer proteins and nutrient receptors) in evading or promoting infection by bacterial viruses (bacteriophages), in the Martens Lab. In addition to being a Rackham Merit Fellow, Fuentes was a trainee on the NIH-sponsored Genetics Training Program training grant (T32) and a recipient of the HHMI Gilliam Fellowship. Fuentes earned his BS in Biomedical Science and MS in Cellular and Molecular biology at California State University, Sacramento. Outside the lab, Fuentes is an executive board member for the UM Native American Student Association where he assists undergraduates students develop programming for Native American Heritage Month and serves as a planning committee member for the Annual Dance for Mother Earth Powwow.

Andrés Rivera Ruiz studies astrovirus biology and the way that intestinal epithelial cells respond to infection utilizing biopsy-derived intestinal organoids, in the Wobus lab. Using transcriptomics, he is working on discovering cell type and intestine segment-specific responses to different strains of astroviruses. His research has the long-term goal of finding potential targets for antiviral treatments and/or vaccines for these intestinal viruses, since there are none currently available. Rivera Ruiz received a B.S. in Chemistry from Universidad Ana G. Mendez, Gurabo Campus in Puerto Rico. Outside the lab, he enjoys playing tennis, learning languages, listening to podcasts and trying new restaurants around Ann Arbor.