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Photo by Reed Hutchinson
UCLA Photographic Services
"I try to live life as if everything is possible,"
said Professor Elma Gonzalez, with senior Tracie Smith. |
Persistence Pays
by stuart wolpert
ucla today
When she turned 12, Elma Gonzalez began spending summers picking
crops alongside her parents and siblings, migrant farmworkers who
moved from state to state following the harvest of cotton, cucumbers,
tomatoes and cherries.
“We worked from sun up to sun down,” said Gonzalez,
a professor of biology who has taught at UCLA for nearly 30 years.
“We went from Texas to Nebraska to Wisconsin to Illinois.”
Her father expected her to drop out of school before graduating
from high school but she had other plans. Studious and determined,
Gonzalez became the first member of her family to go to college.
“There were a lot of kids I left behind who were smarter
than I was, and they didn’t make it,” Gonzalez said.
“I’m a very ordinary person, but a little bit tougher,
a little bit more persistent. You have to be persistent.”
And she was. Persistent enough to earn her degree from Texas Woman’s
University, where she majored in biology and chemistry, and to move
on to New Jersey for graduate school at Rutgers University, where
she earned her Ph.D. in cell biology.
Today, Gonzalez is a cell biologist who studies a single-cell
organism called Emilinania huxleyii, frequently found in sub-polar
oceans. But she also has been involved for more than 25 years in
programs that help minority students succeed in scientific research
careers. She is director of UCLA’s Minority Access to Research
Careers (MARC) program. Funded by the National Institutes of Health,
MARC provides financial support to 11 UCLA undergraduates each year.
Recent graduates of the program have gone on to graduate school
at Harvard, Yale and other top universities.
“These students are exceptional,” Gonzalez said. “They
begin to think of themselves as real scientists.”
Gonzalez found inspiration for a career in academia early in life
by hanging out at the library.
“I read a lot — biographies, Russian literature, everything
the county library had,” she said. “The stories by (Anton)
Chekhov fascinated me; all these aristocrats — people with
money and property and no barriers — were living such useless
lives. They were drowning in teacups.”
Gonzalez joined UCLA’s faculty in 1974. “All these
professors I had read about and hero-worshipped were now my colleagues,”
she said. “You wonder how you can live up to their stature,
but I try to live life as if everything is possible.”
As MARC director, Gonzalez helps select participants for the program
and counsels students once they arrive on campus. Each spring, she
teaches a course on new scientific research.
Gonzalez loves being able to give students an opportunity she
never would have dreamed possible as a teenager.
“There are so many very bright students and so much potential
that is often untapped,” she said. “The lack of support
or money or opportunities conspires to keep kids from achieving
their potential.”
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