In spring 2010 my son Raúl Martínez-McFaline, a Biochemistry major at Stonehill College, was part of the GRIIS program at the University of Granada. In this program he worked on his Spanish skills by taking the regular Spanish courses, but also was able to take a course on Spanish medical terms and vocabulary. At the same time he had the opportunity to intern with graduate students from Spain and Latin America in the lab at the Centro de Investigación Biomédica (CIBM) of the University of Granada. In this lab he did some scientific research and worked along with Dr. Ignacio Molina Pineda de las Infantas.
Raúl benefited very much from this experience since it helped him to understand what biomedical research is like outside of the U.S.
After graduating from Stonehill in May 2011 Raúl took a position as a technical assistant in the Jacks Lab, at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. With the experience of his study abroad at the GRIIS program and the one year position at MIT, Raúl applied and was accepted at the Weill Cornell/Rockefeller/Sloan Kettering Tri-Institutional MD/PhD program. He is currently in his fifth year researching melanoma using the zebrafish animal model.
by Prof. José Luis Martínez (Associate Professor of Spanish, Former Dept. Chair, Stonehill College)
