School: University of the Philippines Diliman

Searle Duay is a chemistry instructor at Adamson University. He teaches a variety of subjects including inorganic chemistry and biotechnology. His research interests include antimicrobial peptides, molecular dynamics simulations, peptide membrane interactions, biochemistry and biophysical chemistry.

Marc Mapalo is a PhD student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is currently working on combining paleontological and modern analyses to study the evolution of the body plan of tardigrades.

Elijah Mojares is a PhD candidate in Medical Engineering at the Queen Mary University of London.

Claire Pascua is a PhD student in Civil Engineering at the University of Auckland. Her doctoral research revolves around the seismic performance of buildings — a topic entirely relevant in a country like the Philippines.

Lisa Lamberte is a research fellow at the University of Birmingham. She is an expert in molecular microbiology with a track record of studying gene regulation in bacteria and the human gut microbiome as a reservoir for antibiotic resistance genes.

Miguel Feria heads the research efforts at Indigo Research, an applied artificial intelligence (AI) research company in the Philippines. His current research interests lie in network science, complex systems and natural language processing.

Arielle Sulit is a doctoral candidate in Genetics at New Zealand’s Massey University where she is applying her skills to investigate the microbiome in colorectal cancer.

Kirstene Gultian is a doctoral research fellow at Rowan University in New Jersey, USA studying Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering. In her research, she develops hydrogel-based materials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, particularly for bone regeneration and guiding stem cell differentiation and behavior.

Krizelle Alcantara is a research assistant at the Center for Gene Therapy at the Abigail Wexner Research Institute in Ohio, USA where she works towards understanding her own disease – Neurofibromatosis – by developing a gene replacement therapy for NF2.

Gracile Celine Roxas is a Science Research Specialist at the National Historical Commission of the Philippines. One of her ongoing projects involves establishing the chemical profile of the artworks of National Artist Fernando Amorsolo.

Romar Avila is a master’s student in physical chemistry under the Erasmus Mundus program titled Surface, Electro, Radiation, and Photo Chemistry. His current work involves thin film deposition of high entropy oxides, a class of materials which have the potential to be used for energy storage as supercapacitors or batteries.

Chona Vince Cruz-Abeledo is an Associate Professor at De La Salle University’s Biology Department. She is a principal investigator at the DLSU’s Practical Genomics Laboratory, where she leads a team working on the validation of local practices using genetic markers and GIS technologies to maximize resource use in mangrove crab culture.

Boaz Lee is a machine learning researcher at Facebook. His work currently focuses on the area of graph representation learning and temporal sequence modeling.

BA Racoma is a PhD student in Meteorology as well as Atmosphere, Oceans and Climate at the University of the Philippines and University of Reading. His research tackles tropical cyclones and rainfall over the Philippine mountain ranges.

Irene Crisologo is a postdoc at Northwestern University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. She is working on developing open-source workflows for processing radar data for rainfall retrieval, comparison with satellite-based precipitation data and post-event analysis of rainfall-induced natural disasters.

Pierangeli Vital is an environmental microbiologist whose research aims to answer food safety issues and focuses on identifying contamination in agricultural products and sources.