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My PhD advisor, Dr. Shalini T. Low-Nam, was awarded an R01 grant from the NIH to study the “Signaling mechanisms in activation of chimeric antigen receptor T cells.”

I’m delighted my graduate research could contribute significantly to the foundation of this project. From the project summary:

Over the next five years, we aim to build on our recent discovery that CAR T cells are capable of remarkable sensitivity with single molecule, single cell precision.

We found that direct perturbation of the TCR, in the absence of its ligand, results in a profound dampening of CAR T cell activation outcomes.

That work is in our preprint, CAR T cell cytotoxic responses are rapidly generated and sensitive to the unligated TCR.

Congratulations to you, Shal, and to the many hands that enable this success!

I’m happy to share that the Huang Lab, in collaboration with Jim Christie and Ava Mauser, has been awarded a grant through the Lilly Research Award Program, about $250k over two years.

My contributions were drafting the aims, methods, and figures. I’m excited to work with the insightful and enthusiastic Jim and Ava!

I presented my recent T cell degranulation work at the 2026 FASEB conference on Immunoreceptors and Immunotherapy, and won one of 8 top poster awards among 82 posters, the top 10%.

A big thank you to the organizers, Annemiek van Spriel, Neetu Gupta, and Julie Zikherman, for creating an environment where such lively research discussions could be had.

My 48th donation, and my 6th gallon of blood donated with the American Red Cross, getting close to 50 lifetime donations.

I joined the lab of Dr. Fang Huang as a postdoctoral researcher.

Building on my experience applying microscopy to T cell signaling dynamics with single-molecule precision, I am expanding into optical design, with the aim of building next-generation optical systems to probe new frontiers in cell biology.

I successfully defended my thesis, completing my PhD at Purdue University in Chemistry, in the lab of Dr. Shalini T. Low-Nam.

With great gratitude and sincere appreciation: thank you, Shal, for everything you enabled during my PhD, and for setting the foundation of my research.

Ran Purdue's Boilermaker Half Marathon in 2 hours, 25 minutes, 9 seconds.

I'm delighted to receive the 2025 Purdue University Chemistry award for Outstanding Research Group Safety Representative.

Serving as my lab's safety representative for six years, we maintained an excellent safety record with zero incidents. I appreciate the commitment of my colleagues toward a safe and productive research environment.

Ran Purdue's Boilermaker Half Marathon in 2 hours, 14 minutes, 13 seconds.

A fun little lab outing, where the graduate students and undergrads of the Low-Nam Lab and our significant others ventured out to Turkey Run State Park to enjoy some R&R, exploring the ravines and rustic scenery of the rolling hills of west-central Indiana.

Turkey Run, over the years, was a delightful stop to enjoy nature in its full glory.

My 40th donation, and my 5th gallon of blood donated with the American Red Cross.

Some donors also carry CMV-negative blood, which is especially valuable for premature and newborn babies who need transfusions. You can read more about CMV-negative donations on the Red Cross site.

If you are able to donate, I would encourage you to do so, and to see whether you can help supply blood that could help newborns at risk.

I was in Avon, Indiana, at the lovely W. S. Gibbs Memorial Park, to see the total solar eclipse.

I was delighted to get to shoot the eclipse on my Nikon D3400 with a variable zoom lens at 300 mm. I lucked out by using a solar eclipse eye monocle as a neutral density filter, which got me shots of the sun before and after totality.

Ran Purdue's Boilermaker Half Marathon in 2 hours, 4 minutes, 42 seconds.

Two weeks of research training in Marseille, France, with Dr. Kheya Sengupta, an expert in interference reflection microscopy.

I got experience in clean room operations under a fellow trainee, and benefited from learning techniques around the Langmuir trough, lipid film deposition on glass substrates, and T cell imaging, both in interference reflection microscopy and making use of variable-angle-illumination numerical aperture RICM and multi-wavelength RICM to extract more quantitative information from the IRM signatures.

It is also with great pleasure that I got to celebrate Bastille Day in France, watching the fireworks over the Marseille port, and to travel with my fellow graduate students to the Calanques, where we swam and hiked for the day. A beautiful time learning beautiful science with great friends and colleagues.

I am honored to have had the opportunity to lead the 8th iteration of an annual student-run symposium, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Biomolecular Galaxy.

The event featured 51 poster presentations and 19 oral presentations, bringing together graduate students from eight universities on 16 and 17 May, two days of contributions and discussion across biophysics.

In particular, I thank Dr. Jay T. Groves for traveling to deliver the keynote address. And without the organization, effort, and grit of my fellow graduate students on the planning committee, the symposium would not have been half of what it was.

It was a pleasure to be selected for the 2022 Gordon Research Conference, and the associated Gordon Research Seminar, on Biointerface Science.

The theme, Functional Assemblies and Biomolecular Information Processing, brought together an exciting group of researchers. Interacting with people who had intimate knowledge of my techniques and their nuances was an incredible experience.

Thank you to the presenters for sharing their results and ideas, and to everyone I met during the poster sessions. Your thoughts and advice were stimulating, and I look forward to bringing them to life in the lab.

I was awarded an extension to my T32 training fellowship, carrying funding into August 2023.

I'm looking forward to using the opportunity to conduct rigorous biophysical research, and to continue sharing my research experience with the T32 community at Purdue and the research community at large.

A big thank you to my advisor and graduate committee for their guidance over the last year. Your support continues to advance my research career.

I enjoyed participating in and sharing my research via a poster at the Garnet E. Peck Symposium.

The depth of immunology expertise was a big shift from my usual biophysical community, and communicating with colleagues from a different specialization was exciting.

It was a real pleasure to go back to the American Chemical Society national meeting in San Diego, now as a graduate student, and present my own work.

There I was able to meet up with my undergraduate American Chemical Society group from Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio, to check in on how they were doing and share the work from my graduate studies with them.

Today I defended an original research idea: quantifying RuBisCO activity at the single-cell level using a ratiometric NADPH reporter, then correlating that activity to carboxysome ultrastructure by cryo-electron tomography.

I'm excited by the advance to candidacy, and by the increased ability to focus on my dissertation research.

Very excited to have completed the Purdue half marathon on limited training and general fitness, or the lack thereof.

A big thank you to the pace runners, who I relied on heavily to keep me at a constant (slow) pace.

Nikon demoed a spinning disc confocal, and we were able to assess a number of different cell lines and the instrument’s general applicability, as we might make use of the spinning disc for live-cell measurements.

I really appreciate the innovation on the Nikon team’s front, coming up with creative solutions to facilitate the demo in our lab space, and teaching us how to make use of the instrument so rapidly.

In the spring of 2021 I was awarded a position as a trainee in Purdue's NIH-funded T32 Training Program in Molecular Biophysics.

I developed and delivered a 45-minute presentation on my projected PhD work, coordinating the virtual and in-person halves of the meeting.

I was glad to field my committee's questions adequately, and I'm looking forward to researching the new areas of interest they raised.

Thank you to each of my committee members: Dr. Philip Low, Dr. Seung-Oe Lim, and Dr. Fang Huang. And a big thanks to my advisor, Dr. Shalini Low-Nam.

Purdue's chemistry graduate program has three primary requirements: passing five cumulative exams during monthly exam periods over the first four semesters; passing an oral candidacy exam, the Original Proposal, which defends an original research idea that, at Purdue, must be unrelated to one's dissertation work; and defending an original dissertation.

In February I finished the cumulative exams, having only just begun my second semester. Graduate candidates have two years to finish them, so I was very excited to have passed so many so quickly. It is not uncommon to finish within the first three semesters, so I was a little ahead of the curve, but not the first to finish.

The lab received, and with the aid of the Nikon installation team set up, our main instrument: a multi-modal Nikon Ti2 microscope configured for total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF), as well as epifluorescence and bright field.

A big shout out to Andrew from the Nikon team for letting me shadow him as he set it up, and for answering my many questions about the system.

For my 24th birthday I challenged my older brother, John, to run a marathon with me. He was stationed in Texas at the time, so I got to fly down and run around a small lakeside park. It was an incredible opportunity.

It was surprisingly much colder on that December day than my intuition of the US south would have suggested. But nonetheless, after eight loops of a roughly three-mile course, an under-trained Kevin and John came to the finish line, John a good bit ahead of me.

An experience I'll always remember, for the excitement and joy of having finished such a physically exerting challenge with my older brother. Now if only I'll get to do the same for my younger brother, Joe.

I was very excited to join the lab of Dr. Shalini T. Low-Nam, a new faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University. I was her first graduate student.

I met her while TAing General Chemistry for Biological Majors, an accelerated general chemistry I and II taught in a single fall semester so that students in that program could move on to organic chemistry in the spring. As a TA I would often go up to Shal after her lectures to ask about specific aspects of the curriculum she was teaching, and to talk about edge cases I had been reading about.

In learning about her research, what excited me most was the capacity to directly visualize and interrogate biological systems, to observe signaling directly, such that the inputs into a cell can be mapped to whether or not it makes a decision. This characterization of cell input to output, or as Shal called it the impulse response function, captured my attention as a kind of clarity my biochemistry background had not conveyed about the actualities of individual cells and what they experience. Biochemical signaling pathways, while clear in their content, lacked the molecular nuance of an actual cell’s experience. I very much wanted to pursue how to make such measurements on living cells, and to try to capture the molecular stoichiometry of the world I live in.

I graduated from Heidelberg University cum laude with a 3.57 GPA, having taken every chemistry course the university offered along with a number of additional philosophy courses I did not need in order to graduate. I double majored in biochemistry and philosophy.

I graduated with honors; my thesis applied W. V. Quine's epistemology of the web of knowledge to science pedagogy. I deeply enjoyed the Honors Program for its interdisciplinary inquiry and its synthesis of different disciplines. A big shout out to Dr. Susan McCafferty and her honors course, Negotiations, taught in the style of her own Harvard training, with case studies and live negotiations each week. I also benefited deeply from Dr. Daryl Close's teaching of philosophy, from analytic to bioethics, from the chemistry taught by Dr. Nate Beres, Dr. Bryan Smith, and Dr. Aron Roerdink, and from microbiology with Dr. Justin Pruneski.

I had the pleasure of leading aspects of the student senate, particularly the parliamentarian and budget committees. As finance head in my final year I was proud of my advocacy for non-linear student activity disbursements, so that funding was less restrictive on small budgets, and our smaller groups could still run regular activities while we continued to fund the larger groups substantively.

At the Heidelberg University award ceremony I was awarded the Robert E. Oleson Outstanding Student Leader Award, for being the top student leader of my graduating class.

At the same ceremony I was given the Pancoast Family Scholarship of the Tiffin Community Foundation, in recognition of outstanding achievement in the sciences and for my continued pursuit of graduate education in the sciences.

I very much had the pleasure of taking part in collegiate Model UN, representing among my teammates the delegation of Uzbekistan, and putting forward motions to advocate for international action on the preservation of the Aral Sea.

It was an excellent experience in navigating international relations and negotiating with my fellow collegiate teams on how to coordinate and cooperate in a mock UN setting.

I attended my final American Chemical Society national conference as an undergraduate, where once more I had the pleasure of accepting an outstanding award for the outreach and science education that we did as a student chapter of the American Chemical Society.

It is also with pleasure that I was part of the class of 2019’s graduating class flag design committee, a three-member group that helped coordinate and design the graduating class flag.

It is with great reverence that we took on the responsibility of designing and customizing the flag to reflect the sense of legacy we wanted to bring to a graduating class. As per tradition at Heidelberg, these flags will fly in University Hall until the day the last member of our class dies.

I am happy with the flag we produced and the sense of tradition we brought to its design and execution: the simplicity and yet the intentionality that we found in many of our prior classes’ designs, trying to embody the symbolism of our university and the colors that we carry.

The chemistry club got to visit the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, DC, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an incredible opportunity to see some of the cutting-edge science going on at our nation’s governmental facilities.

I was really amazed by the precision and analytical rigor at NIST, particularly Melissa Phillips’ lab and its study of food and nutrition, and how the composition of different food materials needs standardized reference materials. I have never held such an expensive jar of regulation peanut butter. Still, incredible to see the precision brought to it, and the insights that become possible.

We ventured to the American Chemical Society national convention in New Orleans, where we were able to demonstrate once more an improved version of chalk chromatography, receive an Outstanding Student Chapter award at the national meeting, and experience the breadth of all that science has to offer.

The Heidelberg chemistry club ventured to Chicago to explore the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry and the Art Institute of Chicago.

It was a great opportunity to connect with the history of science and discovery, and with the cultural elements of the Art Institute.

The Heidelberg chemistry club joined the Toledo ACS student chapter at a local science demo day, one of the biggest science demonstration gatherings I took part in during undergrad.

It was with great pleasure that I engaged in the Heidelberg chemistry club. We were very successful in reaching out to our local Tiffin community, and enjoyed recognition for those efforts across all five years I was at Heidelberg. My first year I was a member of the student chapter, my second vice president, and my third, fourth, and fifth years president of the club. Each year the club received an Outstanding Chemistry Club award from the ACS in recognition of our chapter’s efforts to bring chemistry to our local community and enrich the world through chemistry.

I took the opportunity to fund my own trip to the American Chemical Society national meeting in San Francisco. Four months after dropping out of undergrad, I was still yearning for that connection to science, chemistry, and research.

It was incredible to reconnect with my fellow Heidelberg students and the ACS club, who welcomed me with open arms for the events I could participate in. The week of the conference really enabled me to reconnect with the spirit of science, the pursuit of knowledge, and my enthusiasm for chemistry. It rekindled that ember of excitement I had.

Next came a few catch-up courses over the summer at Penn State Greater Allegheny, just southeast of Pittsburgh, and then, in the fall, a return to my courses at Heidelberg.

Through the generosity of two fantastic donors, the chemistry club traveled to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and toured the facilities. We were also able to visit the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and its graduate chemistry program.

These experiences really shaped my view of the scope and breadth of science, and I was very glad to get the opportunity to see the incredible work happening across the US.

After my car crash I was restricted from standing on my legs for 33 days, and was on crutches afterwards. The limitation struck me hard, because it restricted the expression of my autonomy. It felt as though part of my life had been taken from me, to not be able to run, walk, jump, or move under my own agency.

So when I returned to Heidelberg in the fall, one of my most prominent passions was regaining that sense of command over my own body through physical activity. Long bike rides and long runs were how I wanted to express it, and this 50k on a track was the pièce de résistance of that effort to feel 100% again.

Ran a 50k on a track, 126 loops around, tracked with a baseball pitch counter. It was quite a slog, and involved a good bit of rain. But it is an achievement I still remember, entirely self-imposed, and one of the most rewarding things I have ever pursued and obtained.

After finally getting the okay to start exercising again, I was delighted to take part in a local 5K and see how my training stood up. I was really proud of my effort, and so delighted to run what was, and still is, my fastest 5K. It was a personal best, and just enough to win first place that year, though the final stretch was a highly contested one between me and some of the local cross-country high schoolers.

In retrospect, it was both happy and sad that a race in memory of Brenda Hoffman, from our local community, could be the event where I showed myself that I had recovered from the physical injuries of a car accident, as Brenda lost her life tragically on a bike ride when a car hit her.

Read more about the memorial 5K glow run.

Just fresh from getting out of bed and now on crutches, I was pleased that Heidelberg and my chemistry club advisors allowed me to join the trip to San Diego.

There I joined the chemistry club in presenting our club's selected chalk chromatography demonstration, in the chemistry club poster session for chemical demonstrations.

During my winter recess, on the final weekend before heading back to campus, I was the unfortunate victim of a drunk driver being left of center, resulting in a direct head-on crash with my vehicle, with a very similar outcome to the one demonstrated in this video.

I came away having now broken three bones, and having survived a number of traumatic lacerations to my internal organs.

I give great thanks to the orthopedic and trauma division at the Zanesville hospital, both for maintaining my life after the crash and for assisting in my continued recovery over the next three months. And a big thanks to the first responders who rapidly extracted me from the vehicle and got me the medical help I needed.

I came back the following year and finished in 6 hours, 48 minutes, 28 seconds, averaging 13 minutes 8 seconds per mile.

I was very excited to return and run with Paul once more. Well trained this time, I took on the third lap with great zeal, and it turned out to be my fastest lap of the race.

Freshman chemistry majors are evaluated at the end of their first year on their coursework in chemistry classes, and the highest achieving freshman receives recognition and a copy of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

It contains a great number of chemical constants, thermodynamic values, and otherwise very useful chemistry information that I benefited from having access to over the following years as a chemistry major, and I still make use of its lookup tables when I need a constant.

I placed second in the informative speaking category at the OFA Novice State Championship.

I was really delighted to have the leadership of Dr. Dan Higgins to learn from, and to grow my capacity to communicate.

Below is the speech I gave.

On a July 6th 2014, two men fought to the brink of exhaustion for four hours for the title of the most prestigious grand slam in tennis, Wimbledon. One of those men, Novak Djokovic came out on top to win the last year. In a match only separated by a slim six overall points Djokovic could have attributed his win to skill or knowledge, however, another factor was his racquet. Djokovic’s current weapon of choice is a HEAD racquet relatively new to the tennis scene. Having been first produced in 2012, this racquet uses a developing material, called Graphene. Last updated February 2nd, 2015 the University of Manchester’s website describes graphene as a “one atom thick, two-dimensional crystal” made solely of carbon that is “200 times stronger than steel”. Graphene is currently used in security devices in packages, skis, bicycle wheels, bike shoes, bike helmets, and of course tennis racquets. The University of Manchester puts it this way “The potential of graphene is limited only by our imagination”. To better understand graphene, today, we will take a look under the microscope at graphene’s properties, then we will conduct a few experiments to see its applications, before finally analyzing the implications of this amazing material.

First to better understand Graphene we must take a microscopic look at what properties make graphene so super. For starters, graphene is the world’s first two-dimensional material. Graphene is so thin that it only has a length and width. As indicated by its thinness, graphene is ultra-light, however, just because it is a light weight does not mean it is a weakling, too. As previously stated, graphene is two-hundred times stronger than steel. Something stronger than steel would presumably be thought to be inflexible, but as shown by an American Chemical Society article of October 2012 graphene is “as flexible… as a piece of paper”. It is even fire resistant. The properties do not end at being a great building material though. Graphene is an amazing electrical conductor that even outperforms silver in that it will allow electricity to pass through it 1.5 times more easily. Speaking of conductivity, the title for best thermo conductor now goes to graphene as well. This means that kitchen pots and pans made of graphene will heat up much faster therefore reducing cooking times. We might even be able to watch the pot boil. Graphene’s molecular shape provides a barrier that prevents small compounds from passing through it. This barrier even prevents oxygen from getting through and thus has been recognized by a May 2nd, 2012 American Chemical Society article as an anticorrosion agent that is as good as agents commonly found in car paint. Unfortunately, these fantastic properties cannot be seen by the human eye since that same American Chemical Society article mentions that graphene “absorbs two percent of light” making it essentially “transparent”.

Now that we have observed graphene’s properties we can conduct a few experiments to see graphene’s various applications. These metaphorical experiments will show us two main areas of application for graphene: structural and health related. First graphene’s structural applications. Since its inception in 1903 the aeronautical industry has been plagued by making heavy objects fly. Graphene consequently when applied as a structural material will be able to lighten the load of airplanes and spaceships without compromising their integrity. Since graphene has the optimal conductivity, humans will be able to create even faster computer chips than the current silicon chips. This same electrical conductivity according to the previously mentioned American Chemical Society article will also light the way for “very efficient” solar energy panels that are “cheap”. On the topic of costs, the smart phones of our day and age most likely have touch screens that are made of the rare earth metal Indium. Because Indium is not cheap it follows that graphene which is made of the fourth-most abundant element will be cheap, hence a cheap touch screen. Graphene will be affecting our phones another way too. Phone batteries are man’s best friend, said no one ever. Unlike your dog, low batteries are never a happy sight, and they cannot even rollover on command. In the future though, graphene based super capacitors would replace batteries. Whereas these capacitors would, much like your pet, be awake for days, yet unlike your lazy companion only take a matter of minutes to recharge. Increasing our imagination, graphene could be used to create televisions and displays that are translucent and foldable. The BBC on November 29, 2012 alludes to the possibility of bendable tablets that in theory could be rolled up and taken with you in your pocket.

Taking a look at graphene’s health related applications, we see graphene has several applications such as being sensory devices that could monitor the biological levels of glucose or hemoglobin. To do this a specifically modified graphene compound will bind to the selected substance even in trace amounts. Graphene’s compatibility with tissue cells and its large surface area provides a use in improving the process of tissue regeneration. To do this scientists will use graphene oxide as a scaffolding. According to an article published on May 13 2014 in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics this scaffolding will “provide the base for repopulation” of new cells by encouraging attachment of the surrounding cells. This last application today is a true life saver. Recalling that graphene prevents tiny molecules from passing through it, we could see in the future a graphene product that can distill pure water from any source and even filter pure water from the sea. A February 14th, 2014 article from the University of Manchester states through recent research that filtration of sea water “is no longer science fiction”. With this coming breakthrough in filtration humans could finally easily transform the 96% of earth’s water that is too salty to drink into pure H2O.

Now that we have experimented with some of graphene’s applications, we can analyze the future implications of this amazing material. Graphene’s aeronautical applications will end with planes having improved fuel efficiency, thus creating less air pollution from fuel consumption. This translates into reduced prices for the customer with the added benefit of safer flights both for the environment and the passenger. With the eventual cheap costs associated with graphene, today’s high end PCs will be the future’s economic computers. Anyone could, in theory, obtain the benefits of advanced computer technology. Low budgets in mind, solar panels that incorporate graphene will be more accessible to the population as well as having greater effects on lowering electrical bills each month. Furthering the cost reduction implications of graphene, smartphones could even see a decrease in price with a move away from the present rare-earth metal screens. Not only that but cellular providers may even put bendable in their specifications with pride. Medical advancements headed with graphene may have patients being diagnosed earlier and with more accuracy. Furthermore, even when graphene cannot prevent patient trauma, it may be able to help heal them quicker. Lastly, as an article updated last on November 8th, 2013 by the CDC states that “780 million people” lack safe drinking water. That is almost two and a half times the population of the United States. With a bit of carbon however that statistic could be zero.

In conclusion, one could say graphene is the superman of all materials. That person would be right, but let us not forget that even superman has a kryptonite. Graphene is a developing material and as such producing high quality graphene is challenging. Current processes are far from large scale or even understandable to the average person. The good news however is that more than 120 researchers across the globe are working to improve graphene’s future. Tennis racquets and a few other niche products are all we have today but the potential for graphene is limited only by what we can imagine. From the University of Manchester to MIT, the world’s best and brightest are working on our future, the age of graphene.

Started my undergraduate degree at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio.

The photograph is from freshman initiation week, where groups of freshmen got together and learned about campus life. Our group is recreating ten different sites on campus, with photographic evidence, in the form of different animals, a contest between the freshman groups to have the most creative animals represented in an otherwise mundane logistical task of finding the various administrative buildings.

I'm proud to say our group won, though our use of zombies as an animal was highly contested among the judges. Our AIM advisor, Dr. Nate Beres, advocated for the conclusion, given his Advice Inspire Mentor (AIM) course, Blood, Brains, Bodies, a mentoring course themed around the science and art of zombies.

My first attempt at the Buckeye Buster 50k. I did not finish. I made it about two and a half loops around the course before needing to bail out with two cramped legs and a disheartened heart. I could no longer continue.

I was really inspired to take on this challenge by my high school wrestling mentor, Dr. Paul Wright, and I left the course eager to try again next year.

I graduated from Cambridge High School in Cambridge, Ohio, with honors, and as a student athlete in varsity baseball, soccer, and wrestling, plus JV football in my freshman and sophomore years.

I was also engaged on the Model United Nations team, where I led consecutive years of proposals that made it to the final UN vote. And I played in the concert band from my freshman through junior years, and in the marching band for my freshman and sophomore seasons.

I greatly appreciate the support and camaraderie of being in my senior year play, Annie. I was delighted by the experience even though my roles were rather minor.

The set and stage were incredible. My best friend Andrew played Mr. Warbucks, many of my high school friends were in the cast, and a future Miss Ohio, Matti-Lynn Chrisman, was our lead as Annie.

I especially appreciate Andrew for encouraging me to participate in the play. It was such an incredible experience, and I’m greatly indebted to him for sharing what he was so enthusiastic about for all four years of high school.

I broke my tibia and fibula in a football accident before the 2012 season, and benefited a great deal from the local orthopedics division in Cambridge.

This is a notable event in my life because it is the first of what would become seven broken bones over my life so far. It underscores my appreciation for medical advancement, particularly orthopedic surgery, but trauma surgery more broadly. Keeping people alive and facilitating a recovery that maintains their autonomy over the remainder of their life is a striking thing to be able to do, and it is a large part of what motivates me to learn about new elements of science and biology, and about the way the world works, so that it might be improved for future generations.

I received the Cambridge Wrestling Iron Man Award, given to one wrestler who shows exceptional resilience and dedication to the sport, capturing the principles of honor, commitment, and fortitude.

The award could be given out annually, but was only given in my freshman and sophomore years, as there were no clear winners in the seasons that followed. That makes my appreciation of it greater still.

That season I won 24 matches, 11 of them by fall, and lost 14, none by fall. I did give up two technical falls, which are losses by excessive points. I was proud to very rarely give up a loss by fall in any season, preserving as many team points for my teammates as I could.

I was the first-place grand champion of the 18th annual Ugly Bug Contest, a contest run across all of the seventh-grade classes.

A big shout out and thanks to my mother for helping identify and preserve a rather large insect with long pincer-like tendrils, which had seemingly migrated in from the Appalachian Mountain region. The bug I submitted was a male eastern dobsonfly.

First place in the social studies fair at Liberty Elementary School.

I had mapped out the local forestry trails in my backyard, noting different geographies, such as the hilly terrain, the creek, and the different trees. I was simply excited about trying to understand a part of my life that I really liked, which, that year, meant beginning to explore the forest behind my house.

My younger self might not have fully understood the intent of the science fair, because I was surprised to have won the social studies fair instead of the science fair I thought I was entering. But nonetheless, it was an exciting opportunity to share my enthusiasm for understanding the world.

First place in the science fair at Liberty Elementary School.

I designed different ratios of vinegar to baking soda to see which film canister rocket would pop the highest. It was also a delightful way to explore how to get the most exciting film canister rocket launch.

Growing up on a Christmas tree farm in the Ohio Valley afforded me a great opportunity to connect with my family and to explore the many projects that farm life presents.