Kenia Collins: Encouraging peers to dream audaciously

Kenia Collins says that one of the most important things she learned in her graduate program at Brown was how to become a “respectful disruptor” in the field of nursing. But before she could set her sights on shaking up her profession, she first had to confront and disrupt something more personal: her fears about applying to Brown University.

Collins discovered the Master of Science in Healthcare Leadership program at Brown’s School of Professional Studies at a point when she was ready to take the next step in what she calls her “leadership collision course.” As a registered nurse for over a decade, she’d learned the significance of investing in the well-being of staff at the Roy Lester Schneider Hospital in the U.S. Virgin Islands and yearned for the tools to accomplish this on a systems level. She felt that Brown’s one-year hybrid master’s program, which develops leaders who understand both business fundamentals and the complex, interconnected forces unique to health care, would equip her to drive strategic change.

“I was already thinking about how I could cause ripples of change within nursing and create just and equitable systems in a leadership space, and that’s what this program at Brown focused on,” said Collins, who grew up in the Virgin Islands. “It felt serendipitous. But then I let fear sway me from applying. Admittedly, I come from very humble beginnings, and so I thought, ‘Who do you think you are, applying to be in this prestigious space?’”

Inspired by advice she’d read in a book by empowerment leader Cindy Trimm (“Your feet can never take you where your mind has never been”), Collins tried an unconventional trick: To get into the headspace to prepare her application, she drafted a graduation speech.

When Collins delivers a version of those remarks at the Master’s Ceremony during Commencement and Reunion Weekend, she will extoll the power of “audacious dreams” and encourage her peers to go beyond what they’ve ever thought they can do.

“I had to dream so big that it would overpower my fear of taking that very first step,” Collins said. “And I’m hoping I can inspire others to do the same.”

Collins felt like she was called to health care because of an unsatisfactory experience had by her mother, and focused on nursing because of its human touch. She was working in a hospital in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which was still recovering from the devastation of two Category 5 hurricanes, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Half of Collins’ nurse colleagues and associates left, and those who stayed soon became mentally and physically worn.

Overwhelmed but eager to do something, Collins started a nonprofit focused on using educational interventions to create a more positive culture to support nurses, and built nine separate programs before eventually relocating to Florida. She was enrolled in a nurse practitioner program with a leadership position at a hospital there when she decided to apply Brown.

Collins had never been to Rhode Island and said she experienced a bit of imposter syndrome, but that changed once she connected with her new classmates: “I met so many brilliant minds, all eager to change health care in our own way, and this beautiful mix of people has been instrumental to my learning here at Brown,” she said.

Brown’s student-centered learning approach turned out to be an ideal fit for Collins. She studied how the phenomenon of lateral violence, or bullying among peers, influences burnout among nurses, and worked with her faculty adviser to shape her research and insights into a capstone project. She developed and carried out a workshop for Rhode Island College nursing students about lateral violence and mitigation strategies involving mindfulness, compassion and kindness in conversation.

“Brown was great about pairing you with mentors who supported and aligned with one’s capstone project, which created space in which to bounce ideas, gain perspective and meaningfully advance at one’s own pace,” Collins said. “They gave us the resources and advice we needed to develop our ideas and be successful.”

Collins is looking forward to developing broader initiatives that “respectfully disrupt” and enhance the field of nursing, with the goal of retaining talent, and she is exploring doctoral programs next.

“Overall, I really enjoyed that the program allowed me to do things my way,” Collins said. “It allowed me to really explore and open up and accomplish my goals using my own creativity.”

About three-quarters of the way through her master’s degree, Collins found herself returning to those graduation remarks with a new sense of purpose.

“Brown has a remarkable way of bringing together individuals with diverse backgrounds and perspectives, creating not only a learning environment but a true sense of connection and growth,” she said. She hopes to share with her fellow graduates how this experience has influenced who she is today and the path she is continuing to pursue.

“I believe that you literally have to dream and plan for the future you hope to attain, so that when you arrive, you would have already laid the cornerstone from which to build," Collins said.

Melanie Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa: A journey shaped by resilience, research and representation

Melanie Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa calls their time at Brown University a whirlwind — and that’s not just because they were led here by Hurricane Maria.

When the powerful Category 4 storm devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa was one of nearly 50 displaced undergraduate students from the University of Puerto Rico that Brown helped bring to Providence, where they would enroll and finish their fall semester studies.

But after that fall, conditions in Puerto Rico prevented Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa from returning home. They completed the next spring semester at Brown and stayed in Providence long enough to take part in the Leadership Alliance summer program as a mentee of Associate Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology Peter Belenky.

“At the end of summer, when I was going to move back to Puerto Rico, [Belenky] took me out for a walk around the Biomedical Center and asked me what I was planning to do in the future,” recalled Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa, who had thought they would go into medicine but felt a shift after spending time in Belenky’s lab and conducting microbiology research.

“I remember he just looked at me and said, ‘There’s nothing better than doing what excites you,’” they said. “It was a pivotal moment for me.”

After earning their bachelor’s degree in integrative biology from the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa thought hard about what to do next.

“Being at Brown was one of the best times I’ve had in my life,” they said. “I enjoyed the research I did there more than I ever did the prospect of medicine. So I thought, ‘I’m just going to pursue this, and if I regret it, I can just do medicine after.’ It was the best decision I ever made.”

As a graduate student in the pathobiology program, Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa said they woke up each morning excited to learn and experiment.

Their studies led them back into Belenky’s lab, where they specialized in the microbiome — the community of bacteria and microbes living in an around the body — investigating how early-life stress, such as socioeconomic hardship or abuse, shapes the microbiome and influences the development of anxiety.

Over the last five years, Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa has been active in research and teaching at Brown. They earned the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which funded three years of their Ph.D., and served as the chair of peer mentoring for their graduate program.

Both in and out of the lab, Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa demonstrates an immense acuity for and dedication to science communication, viewing it as essential to making research more accessible.

They co-founded Brown for Science Diplomacy, a graduate student organization dedicated to translating science into impactful policy solutions, and received Brown’s Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence for a Pre-College course they designed called Data to Dialogue: Creative Methods for Communicating Science.

Beyond Brown, they co-founded Ciencia Pa’ Todes, a Spanish-language Caribbean science communication initiative they operate alongside a team of nine scientists, and run a TikTok page dedicated to demystifying the microbiome and answering followers’ science questions.

Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa said there are many talented science communicators bridging the gap between crucial health research and public knowledge. But in their own work, which uses colloquial Spanish, slang and trending Spanish music, Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa aims to target their own community.

“It’s about how we’re bridging the gap and who we’re actually reaching,” they said. “My audience finds it more relatable because it’s coming from people who look like them, who talk like them and already have a sense of what kinds of conversations are going on within the community.”

Their commitment to meeting people where they are extends into classrooms and community spaces, where Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa has found particular joy in working with young learners.

“Talking to children about science is so fun, and they ask so many good questions,” they said. “They haven’t had that shame put into them around asking something ‘dumb.’ They just ask whatever’s on their mind.”

As they prepare to graduate, Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa will miss the community at Brown as they prepare for their next journey. From life-changing mentors to behind-the-scenes heroes, the relationships they developed throughout their five years at Brown will help anchor the remarks they’ll deliver to fellow doctoral graduates at Brown’s 258th Commencement in an address titled “Embracing Your Temporal Self.”

Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa will encourage fellow graduates to see their achievements not as individual accomplishments, but as the culmination of collective effort shaped by family, mentors, ancestors and the broader campus community. They’ll urge their peers to think of themselves as “temporal selves,” holding space for who they have been, who they are and who they are becoming.

“If you want to be your whole self, you need to be present in all three versions of yourself: the past you, the current you, the future you,” they said.

Ortiz Alvarez de la Campa hopes the message will resonate with this graduating class, many of whom began their doctoral programs during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re really a masterclass in resilience,” they said. “Things were rough when we first started and we continued on anyway. As this chapter ends, the world looks kind of crazy again, but we did it once and we can do it again.”