Alum, Camila Rimoldi Ibañez, Continues Her Research and Gives Back to SFSC Students

AVON PARK, Fla. – Feb. 7, 2025 – At an early age, Camila Rimoldi Ibañez became interested in the natural and biological sciences. The 2021 graduate of South Florida State College (SFSC) went on to earn her bachelor’s degree in Biological and Physical Sciences with a concentration in Marine Biology and minored in Environmental Studies in May 2024 from Florida Atlantic University’s (FAU) Honors College.

Born in Argentina, Rimoldi Ibañez and her family moved to Sebring when she was 8 years old. While a sophomore at Sebring High School, she was in the Honors Program and participated in dual enrollment classes through SFSC. She soon became involved in undergraduate research at the College.

Her earliest foray into undergraduate research at SFSC was through an Honors Program Humanities class. She and fellow student, Kyria Wickham, published a paper based on their research on the victims of a hurricane that broke through the Lake Okeechobee dike in 1926, devastating the town of Moore Haven, Fla. She and Wickham assisted in bringing the story to light and honoring its victims, who had been buried in a little know mass grave in Sebring.

Later, Rimoldi Ibañez presented her work on the genes expressed in corals that could be related to sound emission or perception at the Florida Undergraduate Research Conference, the Florida Collegiate Honors Council, and the Florida Academy of Science. She presented her findings on how coral communicate within their biological community during the Experimental Biology (EB) 2021 meeting. The EB is an annual meeting attended by thousands of scientists from around the world. In 2021, as a high school senior dually enrolled at SFSC, Rimoldi Ibañez won the Skoch Scholarship as an outstanding high school senior competing in the State Science and Engineering Fair of Florida.

When she was a student at SFSC, Rimoldi Ibañez’s dream was to become a researcher in marine biology. However, her interest has shifted to becoming a program director or manager for marine protected areas (MPAs).

“MPAs are areas that are regulated and protected to help conserve the biodiversity in different parts of the ocean,” she said. “That role has been appealing to me as an undergrad. It’s an intersection of science and policy and working within and with communities.”

Although she loves the research, she says that she would still be able to look at and analyze data. “I would be in a role where I can apply that data to a bigger picture to protect more of the ocean and make sure that those protected areas are of high quality,” she said.

Rimoldi Ibañez believes that her passion for the ocean and its flora and fauna was the result of not living close to the water while living in both Argentina and Sebring. “I think that made me treasure it more,” she said. “Just having a positive feeling about the ocean – seeing the sea turtle nests and the seagulls added to my passion. Then, you see the negative things happening to the ocean – the trash, the oil – and want to do something about it. When you look at the ocean, you only see a fraction of what’s going on. We need to protect the ocean and its habitats on a large scale. It’s important for all of us to take care of it.”

As a student working toward her bachelor’s degree, Rimoldi Ibañez was required to participate in study abroad or an internship. She spent a six-month study abroad at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. She took on an educational internship at Loggerhead Marinelife Center, an outreach internship with the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, and a marine conservation externship with National Geographic and The Nature Conservancy.

At Loggerhead Marinelife Center, Rimoldi Ibañez, initially, spent a few months as an education intern, assisting with public education programs, giving tours, and discussing the work of the hospital. Loggerhead is a sea turtle rehabilitation hospital in Juno Beach, Fla., near her FAU campus. Later, Rimoldi Ibañez was hired as a marine science educator for nine months. She worked on educational programs and led field trips on and off campus. “We would have large groups of students — kindergarten through high school — that I would lead on field trips, looking at sand pollution, walking them through the steps of sea turtle intake. Off-campus, we would visit lower-income communities and teach children about the ocean and sea turtles. Sometimes, the children would come to the Center and we could introduce them to the sea turtles. Those were wonderful moments.”

Rimoldi Ibañez was also required to submit a bachelor’s thesis project. “I continued the project I was working on at SFSC,” she said. “I went more in-depth. It was about coral making sound. It was correlating the movement of coral and looking at visual data and correlating that with audio data I was finding. I also found what genes might be responsible for the coral making those sounds.”

Although she hasn’t decided yet where she’ll be attending graduate school, she’s looking at programs that would give her more training in policy, advocacy, and research. Some of the universities she’s applying to are: the University of Miami, Northeastern University, State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of South Florida, and two programs in Europe.

As if Ibañez Rimoldi isn’t busy enough, she’s volunteered to participate in SFSC’s PAWsitive Alumni Program. Through this mentorship program, she’ll connect with a current SFSC student who is interested in attending the same post-secondary institution and/or looking to earn a degree in a similar discipline. The student will garner valuable guidance in furthering their education and achieving their life goals. For more information on the PAWsitive Alumni Program, email alumni@southflorida.edu with the subject line: PAWsitive Alumni Program.