Belongings strapped to her back, Nicole Esclamado ‘07 boarded a crowded ferry for the overnight trip to Misali—a small island off the east coast of Africa–where she and two other student researchers would spend the next month assessing reef health.

The three students, along with two park rangers, made up the island’s entire population.

“I snorkeled for most of the day, looking at sea urchins and their predators,” says Esclamado, a biology major from Napa, Calif. “I compared the health of two zones—one that allowed only diving and research and another that permitted legal fishing methods.” 

Before leaving for Misali, Esclamado, who plays on the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps soccer team, studied at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Zanzibar. There, she took a crash course in Swahili, developed her research project and arranged all the logistics for her stay on the island.

“The biggest thing I gained from study abroad was independence,” she says. “I had to learn how to deal with setbacks and overcome obstacles on my own.”

That same resiliency and resourcefulness proved invaluable when she returned to HMC and joined an ambitious neural tissue engineering project led by Elizabeth Orwin, assistant professor of biology and engineering. The research group differentiated bone marrow stem cells into neurons and set out to determine whether the cells would attach to a scaffold that could be injected into the brain. “It’s exciting to actually see things that I used to only know in theory.”