Mentor Award Winners Guide, Inspire Undergraduates
May 15, 2025
Photo: Althea Dotzour/UW–Madison
“From her first semester on campus, Mayra Oyola-Merced made it a priority to engage with undergraduates, despite the many competing demands on her time as an early-career faculty member researching how to improve space-borne observation for predicting severe weather and air quality. Not only is she a caring, dedicated mentor to the undergraduates in her research group, she informally advises many more and is one of the first faculty members students get to know, says department chair Ankur Desai. Oyola-Merced is particularly adept at mentoring the growing number of AOS students from backgrounds that have historically been underrepresented in the field — she is herself an underrepresented scholar and a graduate of minority-serving institutions who worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before coming to UW–Madison. When student Paige Bartels confided that she was having trouble finding a summer research internship, Oyola-Merced took her on. By the end of her first year, Bartels had conducted meaningful research, presented at a national conference and landed a scholarship.”
Read the full UW–Madison News article by Meredith McGlone, May 14, 2025