Congratulations to 2025 Outstanding Postdoctoral Award Recipients!

Postdoctoral Affairs extends congratulations to the 2025 Outstanding Postdoctoral Scholar Award recipients: Dr. Becca Campbell and Dr. Nicole Jimenez! The Outstanding Postdoctoral Scholar Award recognizes postdocs' innovation and research contributions, research productivity, quality of written and spoken communication, and leadership. Read the recipients' bios below.

Dr. Becca Campbell is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona specializing in sleep disorders, trauma, and emotion regulation. She is improving sleep disorder assessment through psychometric research and advancing behavioral sleep medicine. Beyond research, she mentors students, advocates for sleep health, and provides pro bono psychological evaluations for asylum seekers. Becca was a featured scientist at Queer’d Science and actively engages in professional and community initiatives.

Nicole Jimenez graduated with her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology in 2021. Her graduate work centered on reproductive health research with Virginia Commonwealth University’s Vaginal Microbiome Consortium (VMC). Her research for the VMC encompassed comparative genomics of cervicovaginal bacteria, especially Bifidobacterium species, understanding correlations between the cervicovaginal microbiome in reproductive health and disease and maternal-infant microbial transmission and toddler health progression. She joined the Herbst-Kralovetz lab in the Summer of 2021 and utilizes her passion for advocacy work and science to investigate the urogenital and rectal microbiome with a focus on gynecological conditions. Dr. Jimenez conduct basic science related to host-bacterial interactions with key bacteria such as Lactobacillus and Fannyhessea and their role in the pathophysiology of gynecologic cancers. She also performs data science and multi-omic integration for clinical cohorts involving gynecologic cancer and conditions such as chronic pelvic pain and endometriosis. Dr. Jimenez also integrates her advocacy for research on underrepresented populations to assess gynecologic health disparities within the Latina and Native American communities in Arizona. Dr. Jimenez received the Sydney Hopkins, Mayola B. Vail, and Patricia Ann Hanson Postdoctoral Fellowship, UA Data Science Fellowship, UA BIO5 Fellowship, and recently the American Cancer Society Fellowship to elucidate the role of cervicovaginal bacteria in the development of gynecologic cancers. Dr. Jimenez has leveraged her molecular and data science repertoire to aid in achieving her long-term career goals as a translational microbiome scientist actively engaged in women’s health research.