Astronomer Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz of the University of California, Santa Cruz is one of 50 scholars selected to spend a year as a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. A renowned expert on stellar explosions and black holes, Ramirez-Ruiz is also a champion of aspiring undergraduate researchers.

"Doing research early on is very, very important. I think it’s essential for them if they want to go to grad school to do these projects early on to get basically acquainted with what it takes to do research to start becoming young researchers."

Ramirez-Ruiz founded a UC Santa Cruz lab internship that’s designed for physics and astrophysics majors who want to learn to become independent scientists. In a way, he’s paying it forward.

You know, I went to undergraduate school in Mexico and I had the opportunity to go and do an internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory and that changed my life. It opened the doors; I had a wonderful mentor. He filled me with the confidence which is what we try to do with our undergrads.