Award Recognition
Community Building
Senior Marshal
Camila is being recognized for her contributions to multiple communities on campus. As a peer advisor and teaching assistant, Camila has focused her leadership skills on mentoring students in the Psychology and Biology departments. In addition, she works as a research assistant at the Developmental Affective Neuroscience Lab (DANLab) and in the Department of Pediatric Cardiology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC). She has presented her DANLab research on caregiving experiences and neurobehavioral development in children at international conferences and also for her senior thesis. Camila hopes her work will be informative to better understand neurobiological mechanisms relating to irritability and caregiving experiences to consider ways to decrease risks for psychopathology. At CUIMC, her work has added data on proteins involved in embryonic cardiac development, using zebrafish as a model organism. At both labs, Camila has mentored other undergraduates and trained them on lab protocols. She enjoys sharing her own experiences and helping others find their academic passions. Lastly, Camila maintains an enthusiasm for dance, performing throughout college, while also directing CU Ballet Ensemble, a student-company of 100+ dancers. Having been accepted to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai via their FlexMed program in her sophomore year, Camila looks forward to starting medical school this summer. Camila plans to integrate the experiences she has had at Columbia and beyond to keep impacting communities for the better.
Camila would like to sincerely thank her lab mentors Professor Nim Tottenham and Anna Vannucci at the DANLab and Dr. Kimara Targoff at CUIMC for all their support and guidance throughout her years at Columbia. She is also incredibly grateful to her loving family who is always there for her, and, of course, her close friends who have been so valuable to her during her college experience.