The psychology department will be well represented when Ashely M. Araiza, Outstanding Graduate Student, and Jason B. Alipio, Outstanding Undergraduate Student, are honored during Cal State San Bernardino’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences’ 2016 Commencement on Saturday, June 18.
The college’s ceremony, which will cap the university’s 50th anniversary celebration, will begin at 8 a.m. at the Citizens Business Bank Arena, 4000 E. Ontario Center Parkway in Ontario. Parking at Citizens Business Bank Arena will be $5 in lots A, B, C and D. Patrons are encouraged to bring exact change.
And estimated 865 students are expected to participate in the college’s graduation exercises.
Araiza, who graduates with a master’s degree in general experimental psychology, has received numerous honors, awards and grants, including awards for Psychology Outstanding Graduate and Undergraduate Service, the NIH Graduate Fellowship for Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement, and the California State University Future Scholars Scholarship.
As a graduate student, Araiza served as a teaching assistant for research methods and statistics courses, an independent research methods lab instructor, and a research lab manager supervising 15 undergraduate students. Araiza served on the editorial staff of the Psychology Student Research Journal, and has been involved in various service and leadership activities including chair of a paper talk session at the Western Psychological Association as well as president and vice president of the Psychology Club.
Her research interests are health psychology, motivation, self-regulation, weight stigma, eating behavior, and quantitative methods, and her master’s thesis focused on “Weight Stigma and Eating Behavior: The Role of Inhibitory Control in the Relationship between Weight Stigma and Food Selection.” She has presented five posters at national conferences, such as the Society for Personality and Social Psychology as well as the Society for Behavioral Medicine; she also has presented numerous posters at regional conferences.
Araiza will be attending the State University of New York Stony Brook, where she has been accepted into the social and health psychology doctoral program, and has already won a competitive research fellowship.
Alipio, a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps., will graduate with a degree in biological psychology. As a student with a military background, he was intrigued by the adverse mental health outcomes following the stressful environment of combat, and as a college student, sought to learn, and eventually contribute to, the improvement of treatment options for individuals who suffer from these disorders.
He received various competitive research and travel grants to present his findings at state, national and international scientific conferences, such as the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students, NIH Initiative for Maximizing Student Development and NIH Research Initiative for Research Enhancement. In the spring of 2015, he presented his research to Congress at the Posters on the Hill Conference, in Washington, D.C., a highly competitive national event. He also won first place at the CSUSB Research Competition and the system-wide California State University Research Competition.
Alipio has made 21 poster presentations at professional conferences, including the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the Western Psychological Association, the Society for Neuroscience, and the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society. In addition, he has served as a teaching assistant for the experimental psychology course and has been an editor for the OSR Journal of Student Research and the Psychology Student Research Journal.
His academic achievement allowed him to enroll from a bachelor of arts program directly to a doctoral program – an impressive accomplishment. Alipio was accepted into five doctoral programs, and will enroll in the neuroscience doctoral program in the fall at the University of Maryland-Baltimore School of Medicine.
CSUSB will hold three other commencement ceremonies on June 18: The College of Business and Public Administration at noon, the College of Natural Sciences at 4 p.m., and the colleges of Arts and Letters and Education at 8 p.m.
All of the ceremonies at Citizens Business Bank Arena will be webcast live on the Creative Media Services webcast page.
For more information about the June 2016 graduations, visit the CSUSB Commencement website at or contact the Office of Special Events and Guest Services at (909) 537-7360.
For an electronic image of Ashely M. Araiza and Jason B. Alipio, and for more information about Cal State San Bernardino, contact the university’s Office of Strategic Communication at (909) 537-5007 and visit news.csusb.edu.