As Duke responded to the pandemic last year, Alberto García Perez ’23 (Spain, UWC Dilijan) served as head of the policy advocacy team for the university’s International Association. “We worked closely with Duke officials and administrators to ensure that the well-being and interests of international students were represented in the university's policies,” he says. “This proved particularly crucial last year, given the remote nature of classes for many international students as well as the many challenges that the pandemic presented.”

Investing time this year in research that has value to the local community, Alberto has been working with three projects. One is analyzing the ecology and water quality of a creek that runs by campus, investigating its relationship to socioeconomic aspects of its surroundings — “i.e., certain communities are more likely to experience pollution,” he notes. “I was also involved with a project investigating the relationship between droughts and carbon cycling on wetlands,” Alberto adds. The third research effort looks at how coatings can be applied to minimize cleaning of solar panels. “I am using AFM (atomic force microscopy) for this!”

A double major in chemistry and Russian, Alberto is also pursing a certificate in energy and the environment; and he’s a project manager for the Duke Energy Club, whose members do advisory projects for startups and other U.S. companies.