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Students inspire couple to help

Two UROCers get research support

Two more CSU Monterey Bay students have benefitted from the generosity of Barbara Baldock and Phillip Butler.

The Monterey residents have sponsored students through CSU Monterey Bay’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Center since 2010-11.

“We see it as helping give a little bit of a push to students on their way to a higher-level degree,” Dr. Butler told the university’s magazine several years ago.

This year’s recipients of the Baldock-Butler awards are Breanna Orozco (kinesiology) and Lilyana Gross (math). They were selected based on their academic achievements, research accomplishments, financial need, graduate school aspirations and a commitment to serve the community.

Each student will receive $4,000 to support her research and graduate school application activities.

A junior, Orozco (right) is a McNair Scholar and the first in her family to attend college. She spent last summer working at the University of Southern California’s Clinical Exercise Research Center. She’ll return to USC this summer to continue her exercise intervention research. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in biokinesiology.

She has worked with her mentor, Dr. Lisa Leininger, to develop a worksite wellness program for CSUMB employees; the program doubled as a research study to determine if the program increased physical activity and decreased stress in employees. The work has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Fitness Research.

Gross, a junior, intends to pursue a doctoral program in applied mathematics and statistics with applications to biology and public health. Her research interests include stochastic modeling, epidemiology and biostatistics methods in clinical trials.

She spent last summer at North Carolina State University, conducting research on the spread of illicit drugs by modeling methamphetamine use as a disease moving through the population. This summer, she will conduct research in HIV/AIDS clinical trials at the Harvard School of Public Health’s Department of Biostatistics.

Dr. Butler is a graduate of the Naval Academy, was a fighter pilot for many years and spent eight years as a POW in North Vietnam. After earning a Ph.D. in sociology from UC San Diego in 1981, he was a professor of management at the Naval Postgraduate School before starting a management consulting firm. Baldock, a former flight attendant, joined him as marketing director, and they married 33 years ago.

“We feel these people are going to be leaders, and they’re going to make a difference,” Baldock said of the UROC students. “That really resonates with both of us.”