The UCR School of Medicine class of 2024 began their medical school journey online during the COVID-19 pandemic, but finished it on Friday surrounded by cheering family and friends. 66 students received their degrees in the ceremony, which was held on May 31, 2024 in the Student Recreation Center on UCR’s campus. A recording of the event is available here.

Growing up as an undocumented immigrant, Violeta Covarrubias feared going to the doctor with her family in case the visit led to deportation. After obtaining her American permanent residency as a teenager, Covarrubias enrolled at UCLA as an undergraduate, where she volunteered in hospitals and noticed patients in similar situations.

When Keziyah Yisrael, biomedical sciences class of 2024 began working on PhD research focused on the Salton Sea, she had no idea that the project would become an enduring passion and the likely basis for her career.

Growing up in Riverside with two psychotherapist parents, Seiberling knew as a child that she wanted to become a doctor. “I think at a young age, I was just really enamored with the idea of having the knowledge and the ability to bring calm to hectic situations,” she recalled. “There were a few people in my family living with chronic disease and a lot of people in my community who had to interface with the healthcare system a lot, and it just seemed like part of what made a really big difference in their experience was the doctor that they worked with.”

As a high school student, Pedro Villa, PhD, began dreaming of a career in medicine after his grandfather was diagnosed with cancer. Yet just as he was set to receive his bachelor’s degree from UC Riverside in 2012, financial and caregiving challenges blocked his path toward medical school.

Scott Pegan at UC Riverside shares his thoughts on how safe our milk supply is

Nonsense-mediated RNA decay, or NMD, is an evolutionarily conserved molecular mechanism in which potentially defective messenger RNAs, or mRNAs (genetic material that instructs the body on how to make proteins), are degraded. Disruption of the NMD pathway can lead to neurological disorders, immune diseases, cancers, and other pathologies. Mutations in human NMD regulators are seen in neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism and intellectual disability.