Keilan Ramirez

Hello! My name is Keilan Finn Ramirez. I was born and raised in San Diego, and I'm happy to return home for graduate school at UCSD!  

Growing up I was first homeschooled and I then later attended a charter school, which gave me the immense benefit of having a lot of freedom to explore different interests. During this time I also encountered UCSD as I attended the San Diego Math Circle, a volunteer run weekly math seminar group for grade school students which is hosted at UCSD. Going into college applications, I focused on my interests of physics, space, and biology, and I ultimately chose to attend California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo pursuing degrees in Physics and Aerospace Engineering to pursue the first two of those three interests. 

I believe I successfully engaged with these interests at Cal Poly. I spent three years doing astrophysics research under the mentorship of Dr Jodi Christiansen as part of the VERITAS collaboration, which included the opportunity to work at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory and culminated in the creation of my physics senior thesis. I also spent two years as part of the Cal Poly CubeSat Lab, a research lab focused on small satellites called CubeSats, where I gained hands-on engineering experience through running tests and leading the mechanical team for a collaboration with NASA AMES and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) to create a standard airborne CubeSat carrier. I additionally interned at Aerojet Rocketdyne and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) over two consecutive summers.  

In my later years at Cal Poly I discovered a passion for mentorship and teaching after I had the opportunity to teach a Quantum Physics lab and I joined my departments' mentorship programs. The discovery, in addition to encouragement from my own mentors, is what led me to focus on applying for graduate school instead of pursuing a job in industry. Going into graduate school I knew I wanted to engage with my previously neglected interest in biology, and technology courses I took as part of an entrepreneurship minor at Cal Poly lead me to a fascination with broad and emerging fields such as brain-computer interfaces, synthetic biology, and gene therapy.  

Now at UCSD I am pursuing a PhD in Biophysics, and though I don't know exactly what my research topic will be as I haven't even started my lab rotations, I have no doubt I will find it engaging. I am also hopeful that I will be able to continue mentoring others and gaining experience teaching throughout my time at UCSD. In the long term I believe I will be happy as a teacher or researcher, and even if I return to the aerospace industry as an engineer I will be satisfied to have explored more of my interests through this PhD.