(00:00:08) Ken Ono: Welcome to Hoos in STEM. I'm Ken Ono, your host and the STEM Advisor to the Provost and the Marvin Rosenblum professor of Mathematics at UVA. Our goal is to evoke flights of imagination and wonder by showcasing the cornucopia of all that is STEM at UVA: the marvelous world of UVA science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Well, it's that time of year.  It's the time that I think many of our guests have been thinking about for probably many years. It's graduation time. Graduation signs and balloons sprout in front yards. Families and friends gather for garden parties and banquets. I think you know the kind. It's where folks beam and rubberneck before collages of photos. The photos celebrate their graduates. Let's see what comes to mind. There's the baby pic. Maybe the first day of first grade pic. How about the high school sports pic? Or maybe the high school band pic. And of course, the prom pic. These are all memories of iconic rites of passage. And well, graduation from the University of Virginia is kind of an amazing rite of passage. Here at UVA, we will celebrate roughly 8,000 students, give or take a few, who will join the legion of UVA alumni in a few weeks. Our final exercises are an awesome spectacle.

Families and friends all dressed in business casual will overtake the lawn to celebrate 8,000 moments. Each moment years in the making. The moment, it's the sight of their graduate walking the lawn to receive a hard-earned degree from the University of Virginia. Now here on Hoos in STEM, we're celebrating a wee bit early, and this is our graduation celebration special. I gave my student producers Katie Nichols and Reeya Verma a genuinely difficult and almost impossible task, right? We have 8,000 graduates. Their task was to identify four graduating fourth year STEM students to showcase, to show off, to somehow embody and be examples of what is possible at the University of Virginia. Honestly, we could devote an entire year of programming to our STEM graduates, but we had to pick four. So joining us today are like real people. They might not sound like real people, but I assure you that they are living and breathing sitting in front of me here in the studio at WTJU. They are published scientists and award-winning scholars. They embody the realization of our wildest dreams and it's a pleasure and honor to share conversation with our four imminent graduates. So, it's a pleasure to pass the mic to Hoos in STEM student producer Katie Nichols. Katie is a second year studying biology, math, and English, and Sam Crowe, graduating fourth year STEM student. Thanks.

(00:03:09) Katie Nichols: Both UVA's Astrophysics and History departments must be very sad to lose polymath and Rhodes Scholar Sam Crowe to Oxford this fall, where he will pursue a degree in the history of science, medicine, and technology before earning his PhD in astrophysics from Caltech. Sam, welcome to Hoos in STEM. 

(00:03:26) Sam Crowe: Thank you for having me.

(00:03:27) Nichols: So Sam, unless our listeners are living under the Lawn, they've likely heard about your incredible achievements in the Astrophysics department here and well beyond, as the first undergraduate to become a Principal Investigator on the James Webb program. Can you talk about what it means to work with data from the largest and most powerful telescope ever built?

(00:03:51) Crowe: Sure, I mean it's really a pretty surreal experience. I guess I could get into how that started.  I had relatively humble beginnings. I had started working on a project in my first year actually, studying star formation, in particular massive star formation, so the formation of stars over 8 times the mass of our sun in the central regions of the Milky Way. So that's a region around 25,000 light-years away from Earth, so extremely far for human length scales but actually pretty close by cosmic length scales, considering the entire scale of the universe. So there was one particular star forming region called Sagittarius C that I particularly honed in on, and I wrote up a James Webb Space Telescope observing proposal with my advisors in the Astronomy department at UVA and we were very lucky that we received time to study this star forming region with the James Webb telescope. It's really a wonderful experience. The data is pristine, It's beautiful, It's inspiring to work with, and it's also very scientifically rich, so it's given us a lot of information about how star formation is occurring in this very extreme region; the sort of new physical processes that might occur uniquely in the center of the Milky Way as opposed to the closer solar neighborhood around our Sun and a whole host of other interesting scientific issues that we're still sorting through even though we've already published a couple papers on this topic. So, it's really been a pleasure to work with that data over the past year and a half or so.

(00:05:10) Nichols: Who are you looking forward to continuing some of this work with?

(00:05:15) Crowe: Yeah, so my advisors at the University of Virginia, so Professor Jonathan Tan in the Astronomy department postdoctoral researchers Yichen Zhang and Rubén Fedriani but I've also been working a lot with professors at other universities. So I spent a couple weeks in Colorado in 2024, working with the professor John Bally, who's emeritus at University of Colorado Boulder, and he's also a wonderful mentor of mine. So, you know, it's been a wonderful collaboration. I've roped in a lot of people to work on it with me and hopefully I'll rope in a few more as time goes on. But yeah, it's been a real pleasure.

(00:05:44) Nichols: Wow, that's incredible. It's really not the sort of thing that even your above-average average UVA student is stumbling upon so I'm really curious, how did you get started with this work?

(00:05:56) Crowe: Yes, like I said, I had relatively humble beginnings. It really all started with a class at UVA, a one-credit class called Astronomy 1610, Intro to Astronomical Research Methods or something along those lines, I think it's called. It's basically just a one credit class where professors come in every week and give a 1-hour talk to the students about their research.  There are two main goals of the class: one of them is just to expose first year undergraduates, they're mainly first years who take the class, to research, what research looks like, how it gets done, and ask some questions in a very casual environment. One of the other goals is if any undergraduates are interested in research opportunities, it's a good chance to ask professors, hey, do you want to work on something, and that's exactly what happened in my case. Professor Jonathan Tan, who's a professor in the Astronomy department, gave a talk about his work on star formation, it must have been February 2022, and I thought it was super cool. I mean, I must have asked him a million questions about his work and that must have impressed him because when I came up to him to chat after his talk and basically said, hey do you have any research that you want a student to work on, ‘cause I want to work on some research, he said sure, send me an email. So, I sent him an email. He gave me a project, we started working on it and then from there, I spent the summer after my first year in Sweden doing research in Jonathan Tan's group and then, through a post-doctoral researcher called Rubén Fedriani who I had met in Sweden, I went to work with him in Spain the next summer, the summer after my second year, and then that led to other research opportunities. I mentioned I worked in Colorado with this professor John Bally, I worked in Wyoming the summer after my third year, but everything really sprung from there, there was no magic potion, no secret password, I just walked up to a professor, said hello, got his email and then started working on research.

(00:07:36) Nichols: Yeah, that's great to know. If only we could all study the stars in Spain… which makes me wonder of course, what you're most looking forward to at Oxford and then Caltech beyond. Anything you'll miss most here at UVA? I know your Roman Empire is the Roman Empire.

(00:07:50) Crowe: Yeah, I think it's the people I'm going to miss the most at UVA, in particular the advisors who I just mentioned in the Astronomy department, but also in the History department, Professors John Lendon and Elizabeth Meyer, who have been my main History advisors but also all of my friends who I've met first year, in my first year dorm, but also friends in my majors, friends who I might meet at like live music house shows or in clubs that I've joined, and the communities that I've been able to engage with. It's really made the experience I've had at UVA what it has been. And I think that any success that I've had, that I've been very lucky to have at UVA, I really attribute to the people I've been around.

I'll say that I've been most inspired talking with my mom during my time at UVA, which is maybe a somewhat unusual thing for some students, whose parents will send them off to school and then, see you at holidays, Christmas and Thanksgiving, but my mom actually, during my time at UVA, has come to live in Charlottesville and now I'm living with her as she's now a professor in the Applied Math department in the Engineering School. So I've had many conversations with her, daily basically, at this point, as I'm living with her over the past year, and she's been a non-stop inspiration for me during my entire journey, to get to this point but especially over the past few years as a university student.

(00:09:00) Nichols: Yeah. Gosh, quite an accomplished family. Applied Math professor to hopefully Astrophysics professor, someday.

(00:09:06) Crowe: We'll see, yeah.

(00:09:07) Nichols: Awesome. It's been great talking to you, Sam.

(00:09:09) Ono: Well, Sam that was that's wonderful. You've been to Spain, Sweden, Wyoming, probably a bunch of other places. Where would you want to go in your journey, like maybe outer space?

(00:09:21) Crowe: You know, there's been a lot about that in the news recently. I would not be opposed to going to outer space if somebody could pay for me to go. That is…

(00:09:31 Nichols: Can't exactly reach the sort of stars you're studying.

(00:09:33 Crowe: Not right now, no. 25,000 light-years is a bit far away, unfortunately.

(00:09:37 Ono: So, moving right along. It's a pleasure to pass the mic to my other student producer, Reeya Verma. Reeya is a third-year Echols and Jefferson Scholar and she is going to interview two guests. The first guest she's interviewing is Campbell Coleman.

(00:09:54 Reeya Verma: Thank you Ken. I'm excited to be joined by Campbell Coleman, a physics and neuroscience double major at the University of Virginia. His research spans from EEG-based studies in the NICU to high resolution MRI modeling of brain function. Campbell, welcome to Hoos in STEM.

(00:10:14) Campbell Coleman: Thank you.

(00:10:15) Verma: So, you're a physics and neuroscience double major. You discovered your passion for physics back in high school, and bringing that to UVA, you discovered your love for neuroscience and taken on some incredibly ambitious and thoughtful research. And in one of these initiatives, I heard you're creating a universal theory of brain function. Tell us about your research and how you are able to connect it to some pretty cool real world clinical outcomes.

(00:10:43) Coleman: Well, my journey with research has been one of self-discovery. So I came to UVA really interested in physics. I studied physics in high school, you know did really well, I was really passionate about the math behind it and the theory. And so, then I came to UVA, I quickly declared a physics major but then I sort of realized a little bit, that maybe I might be destined for something else. I started taking some biology classes, and I have doctors in my family, so I started to sort of realize that maybe something in medicine might be a good idea. So, I took my intro bio class, Intro Bio II. There's a big physiology component of that where you learn about the neuron, and in that class I learned about the action potential, which is how the neuron basically acts like a wire. And you can use a circuit model to describe that, with all of the proteins that exist on the cell membrane and how current flows down the axon. You can use basic electricity and magnetism to describe that activity. And so in that moment, I saw the unification of something that I was really passionate about in high school and something that could lead me to something I'm passionate about with medicine too. I saw that intersection in that class, and it was around that time where I sort of needed to make a decision. So that was second year, and I sort of needed to make a decision about the path that I wanted to take, and I had someone very important in my life named Sydney Levy. She is another Jefferson Scholar, and she and I worked in a volunteering organization where I baked bread and she baked bread, and we sold it to raise money. And she said she had a mentor who she really liked working with. His name's Kevin Pelphrey, and he had a bunch of crazy ideas, and I had a bunch of crazy ideas and when you put two people together that have a bunch of crazy ideas, typically, some cool things happen. So she introduced me to him, and that began the long journey to where I am today with my research.

I've met a lot of really interesting people. I work with individuals in the School of Data Science doing computational neuroscience work. I also work with experts in the School of Medicine, in the Department of Neurology, in the NICU as you mentioned, doing EEG work.  I'm really in a lot of different spaces at the university, but I'll say that the research that I'm most passionate about now is how we can describe the speed of signaling in the brain and how that's related to clinical manifestations of disorders like autism. So, Autism is a very heterogeneous disorder and the way that we describe it is complex. It is really an issue of you know, brain network inefficiency and so how we describe that, it's looking like, you know, how fast are signals propagating in the brain, that's sort of the basis for it now. My research currently is understanding how autism is driven by differences in axonal white matter, so how thick myelin is. The thickness of myelin determines how fast signals propagate in the brain, and it's looking like individuals with autism have globally reduced myelin. And so, the physics side of that is how fast the signals are propagating in the brain, and then the medicine side of that is how it's affecting an individual's ability to engage with everyday life. So, I think that sort of intersection of physics and medicine is really, really interesting to me.

(00:14:06) Verma: Wow. Your ability to bridge cutting-edge theory with more hands-on clinical work is incredibly powerful, but your impact at UVA clearly goes beyond the lab. You've also served as representative in the University Judiciary Committee and as President of our prestigious Raven Society. Both organizations reflect a passion for service. How have these shaped your perspective on representation within the STEM community or even the greater UVA landscape?

(00:14:37) Coleman: I think part of my journey through science has been realizing how much I want to spend my time doing the science and how much I want to spend my time in the community. I've learned that science is a really social field. You rely so much on your network to get into projects, and to do projects, and to do the science, and so you can't do it all by yourself. And I think while at UVA, I've realized that to be a scientist to me is to do the science but also to be an active member of the of the world around me. So I've been really involved in the University Judiciary Committee, as you so kindly mentioned, as a representative, where I help the university make decisions about student misconduct. So, if a student is unfortunately involved in a physical assault case, is either the victim or the perpetrator, I'm one of the people that help decide what to do with that situation. That's not related to science at all but to me, it helps me stay grounded and helps me realize what all this work is for. It's for helping the community and helping us understand ourselves better. The same goes for the Raven Society too, that's a little bit more personal and more directly related to science, in the fact that we give money in the form of fellowships. Catherine here is a recipient of one of those fellowships. So, we get to give money to really outstanding aspiring scientists, and as a scientist myself, it feels like I'm, you know, saying thank you for all the work that they're doing. So, it's really about giving back, and helping me realize what is the science for. It's not just for myself.  It's for the world around me.

(00:16:09) Verma: It's just so inspiring to hear how you've built community here at UVA while also pushing the frontiers of science. And now, you take this next step to Stanford to pursue medicine. Huge congratulations, by the way. You're continuing that multidisciplinary journey. So, what goals have you set for your career in medicine and what advice do you have for UVA students like myself who are looking to combine disciplines?

(00:16:34) Coleman: Thank you. I'm really excited to go to Stanford for medical school. I think my approach to medicine is not a traditional one, and the fact that I have really niche research interests and I really want to see the path, the future of medicine pushed forward in a way that I don't think most schools really see. But at Stanford, that's well appreciated. In that at Stanford, I'm going to be a part of the physician scientist training program, which means I'm going to be treated basically the same as other graduate students, as other PhDs, but my degree program is going to be focused on clinical applications. So, I'll have the opportunity to engage in a longitudinal research project between two-to-four years, similar to the, I guess, four-to-eight years of a PhD, with the focus on applying it into the clinic.

I want to be a physician scientist, and that means seeing patients and also doing basic research or clinical research. I don't really know what that looks like specifically, but I I'm really interested in continuing studying how the structure of brain matter differs in different, you know, neurological conditions and how we can use advanced neuroimaging methods to help surgeons better plan surgeries as well as use AI to predict patient outcomes and help plan surgeries. AI is the future of medicine, point blank, full stop. And at Stanford, that's what they're doing. I'm hoping to maybe get a degree in data science and learn how I can integrate those sorts of skills in my future career as a physician and hopefully have a career in academia. For aspiring premedical students, I think my biggest piece of advice is do what you want and do what you love. I think in general, there's a sort of, you know, checking off boxes type of mentality for being a premed student and I've sort of thrown that in its own face in the sense that I've done things that are untraditional and I've benefited greatly from it, and it's because I was passionate about it. So if you feel like there's something that you want to do and you don't feel like it aligns with your goals in medicine, that honestly probably is a good thing. Medicine is about getting outside the box and changing things up. If you do what everyone else has done before, just like in science, nothing will get done. It’s the same for medicine. So if you feel passionate about something, do it. Otherwise, you'll be miserable and you won't have fun. Science is about fun. Have fun. 

(00:18:58) Ono: Campbell, that's awesome. I wish we had more time. I think I have a comment and then a question for you. The first comment is good luck at Stanford. In terms of what you want to do, it’s one of the world's leading institutions. It’s well known for its interdisciplinary work and with regard to the work that you want to do, some of the most important advances in MRI technology that have reduced the length of time it takes to get a scan, an image, was done there in collaboration between biomedical engineering and mathematics and statistics so that's great. So now for my question. I didn't realize that you're the President of the Raven Society and I wanted to ask you a question about that. Isn't it tradition that members have to write a poem fashioned, or written, in the style of The Raven that describes their personal goals? Is that right?

(00:19:56) Coleman: That's correct.

(00:19:57) Ono: So what was yours? How did it begin?

(19:59) Coleman: Oh, well I know when I wrote it… once upon midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary, as is most of the time of how I do work, late in the night. I don't remember the exact details but that's how they all start.

(00:20:15) Ono: Great. Katie, this is a generally difficult one, I think, for us. You will be interviewing someone we've known for quite some time, Catherine Cossaboom. I remember Catherine when she was maybe four feet tall.

(00:20:25) Nichols: Right. I mean, Marshall Scholar Catherine Cossaboom has taken UVA's Math department completely by storm. She's been with Hoos in STEM from its earliest days as its very first student producer and I know she will continue to dazzle at Oxford and beyond. Catherine, welcome to Hoos in STEM.

(00:20:42) Cossaboom: Thank you so much for having me.

(00:20:44) Nichols: So as a student of UVA's Math department myself, I have known you as a star since the very beginning of my time here. Can you talk a little bit about your path to pure mathematics and hardcore research in the field?

(00:20:58) Cossaboom: Yeah, so it actually all began for me when I started to work in my first year with the host of this very podcast, Ken Ono. I reached out to him actually long ago, when I was a senior in high school because I met him briefly at Emory's Math Circle. So I grew up in Atlanta, and Ken was at Emory while I was in middle school, and we crossed paths. At the time, I was a math competition kid, and I had just made the Georgia State math team as an eighth grader and that was fantastic. But research math is very different than competition math. I had some very brief exposure to number theory through just popular math books and the internet and so by the time I was accepted to UVA, it all felt very serendipitous that Ken Ono was here and the stars aligned, and the rest is history.

(00:21:40) Nichols: Wow, yeah. So, you said exposure to number theory and I'm curious about whether you could tell us what that is exactly, and how exactly it has captivated you over the course of your time here at UVA?

(00:21:53) Cossaboom: Yes, of course, yeah. Number theory is largely the study of integer sequences, though that's a very simplified definition and number theorists would dispute me on that. When I came to UVA, I first entered into that space with a directed reading program in my first semester with one of Ken's then-PhD students, Will Craig, working on understanding the connections between modular forms and elliptic curves, which are actually connections that resulted in the landmark proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in the 1990s, which is one of the greatest mathematical achievements of the century. And so building on that initial study, under Ken's guidance, I wrote my first research paper in the area of modular forms, looking at an integer sequence called the partition numbers. So a partition number is the number of ways to write a number as the sum of other numbers. One very quick example is p(4) is equal to five, because we can write four in five different ways: as 4 itself, as 3 + 1, as 2 + 2, as 2+ 1+ 1, and as 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. And so, we actually know very, very little about the sequence of numbers. In fact, we don't even know if any positive percent of them, even 1%, is odd or even. So, what I did in my first project was use rather complex analytic machinery in the space of modular forms to get some kind of understanding of when the partition numbers are odd. And so through that project, I really fell in love with research, and I dove into a lot more foundational material. I learned a lot about analytic number theory and about automorphic forms. And my second paper, also with Ken, over my sophomore summer was about the gaps between primes.

In 2013, James Maynard, he will come up later, won a Fields Medal showing that there exist infinitely many prime numbers that are closer together than 600. And so there's this really famous unsolved problem in number theory called the twin prime conjecture that says that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that are exactly two apart. So think, three and five, five and seven, 11 and 13, and so on. Before James Maynard, with one exception that happened in the same year, there was actually no number, like even as big as 1 trillion, that we knew that there were infinitely many pairs of primes that are closer together than 1 trillion. And so, showing that that is true for 600 was an extremely remarkable statement. So what my collaborators and I did was extend this machinery into an arithmetic geometric setting, which means that we looked at primes associated to elliptic curves, and I really gained a deep understanding for how James Maynard was able to achieve that Fields Medal. So yeah, going into my third year I got very, very excited about so many things, and I landed in a project where I was looking at the intersection between number theory and combinatorics, so I was answering questions back in the space of partitions and that earned me a joint appointment between the University of Cologne and the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Mathematics and so I had a really wonderful time working in environments, in two environments actually, where I was essentially the only undergrad. I'm just really grateful for where the mathematical journey has taken me so far and where it will continue to take me.

(00:25:18) Nichols: Yeah, wow. That's great to kind of get the feel for your track here. And then, I know Europe is in your future too. So, what are you most looking forward to about this incredible Marshall Scholarship opportunity?

(00:25:29) Cossaboom: Yes, so I will be going to Oxford in the fall to start a research master’s and I said to remember the name James Maynard. James Maynard is actually the Fields Medalist that I will be working with while I'm at Oxford, which is just beyond exciting. In this day and age, it's very difficult to make fundamental advancements in the field of pure analytic number theory where we're specifically looking at the primes, and it has been remarkable to watch the last few years of Maynard's career because he has these really piercing ideas. Mathematicians have been obsessed with the prime numbers for essentially as long as there have been mathematicians, and what is so remarkable about what James does is he was able to come into a space where very little headway has been made and bring his own technological advancements, almost like a telescope that illuminated more paths for future mathematicians to take and laid the groundwork for much, much more advancement in a field that many mathematicians were afraid to tackle.

(00:26:31) Nichols: Awesome. And how is that fitting into your longer-term goals?

(00:26:37) Cossaboom: One day, I really want to become a mathematics professor and mentor the next generation of mathematicians, much as Ken has done for me. And one of the things that has been really important to me at UVA is having a wonderful community of female mathematicians. We have a lot of women math professors here, and math remains a field where there continue to be very few women mathematicians compared to the other sciences. When I came to UVA, one of my big missions was actually to expand the number of women in the math department at UVA and so I restarted the national chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics at UVA, which had disbanded during the pandemic. And originally, it was really all about building community and creating support for the few of us that there were, and it eventually became so much bigger. We grew membership to over 100 people and launched full-scale mentorship programs and volunteering programs and most recently, I've started a colloquium, bringing in women across the country to speak to our members, which will actually run on Thursday this week. It's been labor of love, and I really want to continue that kind of work into an academic profession alongside the research itself.

(00:27:54) Nichols: Yeah, I know it well. I mean, you've been such a mentor to me personally, and we're so lucky to have so many wonderful graduates in STEM who are not only really making these discoveries but also understand the importance of science for the community, for giving back.

(00:28:12) Ono: Well it's been super exciting time, Catherine. I have no doubt that you will be leading the way. So, we've heard from three of our guests and it's pretty inspiring. As turbulent as times may be, I think what you hear, certainly have heard from our first three guests, amazing accomplishments. You hear the benevolence in their work, in addition to the incredible scientific achievements that they all embody, and as the STEM Advisor to the Provost, nothing could make me more proud of the University of Virginia and what we achieve here. You know, these stories… it’s more than just the future of science, they give us hope. So Sam, Campbell, Catherine, thank you for telling these stories. So, we have one more guest. Reeya will be introducing and interviewing Deniz Olgun. And he may be last, but he's certainly not least.

(00:29:11) Verma: It's an honor for me to introduce Deniz Olgun, soon-to-be graduate of the University of Virginia, who is a neuroscience and computer science double major. He began his research here on the gut-brain axis and went on to champion cancer-focused computational work at Harvard Medical School and the University of California San Francisco. I'm so grateful to have the opportunity to speak with you today, Deniz. Welcome to Hoos in STEM.

(00:29:37) Deniz Olgun: It's a pleasure to be here.

(00:29:38) Verma: So, when you first got to UVA, you dove straight into the gut-brain axis and that led to some pretty cool advanced work combining neuroscience and computation. How did your early experiences at UVA set the foundation for your work you're doing now?

(00:29:53) Olgun: In fact, I had started research first at Virginia Tech’s Department of Neuroscience in high school, and when it became clear I was going to come to UVA, I spoke with my advisor about who might be interesting to work with and I heard about this really cool scientist, Alban Gaultier. And when I came here, I promptly joined his lab and I thought he was asking really interesting questions, and so the lab was focused on studying the gut-brain axis in health and disease, particularly in the context of multiple sclerosis.

The gut is really interesting. It's known to be involved in the pathology of multiple sclerosis from data in humans, but there are trillions of microorganisms in our gut and we currently don't have any way to do precise editing on it, besides broad recommendations like diet. So, we were really interested in untangling the downstream biochemistry, so what molecules or bacteria are the altered gut microbiome secreting that's different than normal physiology, and what receptors are they binding to in the body so that we could inform the design of more targeted drugs.  In one case, we narrowed down part of this response to a particular T- cell receptor, the aryl hydrocarbon receptor, and a type of transporter protein in the gut endothelium called the bile acid transporter. So that was one really exciting project that was really refreshing, and at the time I was one of the only people who could program in the lab so I got onboarded onto a lot of different projects and found some early independence and that was really exciting.  When I went on to later work, I felt I had a very good foundation. It was where I really cut my teeth both at the dry and the wet lab.

And then at Harvard, I started working on questions in cancer neuroscience, particularly understanding the phenomenon of perineural invasion in pancreatic cancer. So, I spent one summer there and then continued on a computational appointment through the last two years remotely. Concurrently, I'd also started up a remote position at UC San Francisco, where I was working on computational methods and revisiting a very old classical question in biology with modern methods called RNA elongation, and we were applying a technique called long read sequencing to study that.

(00:32:10) Verma: What a journey, Deniz. It's one thing to excel in research but what's perhaps even more remarkable is how you've used your background in science to make an impact in deeply human ways on a global scale. You recently led a huge humanitarian effort in Turkey following devastating earthquakes, for which you were awarded the Davis Prize for Peace. So, walk us through how you connected STEM education and disaster relief in such a tangible way.

(00:32:38) Olgun: Sure. For anyone who isn't familiar, in the winter of 2023 there was a series of terrible earthquakes in Turkey and Syria that ultimately killed over 50,000 people and put millions more out of their homes, out of work, and out of school. And as a Turkish American, I felt a special kind of affinity for you know, these people, and what they were going through. And so, I reached out to actually a professor at UVA, Larry Sabato, who helped me get in contact with congressional offices. At the time, Congress was debating a humanitarian funding bill, up to $235 million for this conflict, and I wanted to see what I could do. I had been involved in some local fundraising efforts, but I could see it wasn't making a big wave in the way that the situation demanded. So, I put together a delegation of Turkish-American undergraduates here at UVA and got in contact with five congressional offices of Congresspeople and senators across party lines, and we went up there to lobby for this bill to be passed. We translated from Turkish into English primary source reports from NGOs that were on the front lines. They were only one small part of the picture but the bill ultimately passed, which was really exciting.

Looking forward, I was figuring out how to get involved myself in a more tangible way, which led to me applying to the Davis Prize through UVA and ultimately receiving through them a $10,000 grant to go run a humanitarian project in Turkey that summer. So, I flew out, we built two STEM makerspaces at rural local high schools in Adana, near the earthquake’s epicenter. What we did there is we put together and handed off 3D printers, circuit building kits, and little microprocessors, all with the intention of compensating for the time these kids had lost from school, giving them a space to exercise their creativity and engineering skills, to help, you know, ease them back into the classroom. And we did this in coordination with the local school's principals and engineering teachers, with the idea that you could maybe learn about a circuit in physics class, and the very next day go build it yourself and take any kind of measurement you would like. It was deeply rewarding to see the enthusiasm that these kids had for this space and the excitement for what they could now do with their creativity. After I left Turkey, I stayed in contact with one of the schools who had actually started up autonomously their own competitive robotics team using one of the kits we had donated to them. And so, I spent some time mentoring them over Zoom as they were getting set up.

(00:35:28) Verma: Thank you for your work and for sharing it here. It's both inspiring and humbling. Your path so far has already spanned multiple disciplines, institutions, and causes, and it's just the beginning. Continuing your research. you plan to spend two dedicated years at Harvard Medical School before pursuing an MD PhD, ultimately blending oncology focused research with patient care. How do you see your experiences at UVA shaping your approach to cancer neuroscience and then going on to bridge the gap between bench science and clinical practice?

(00:36:04) Olgun: When I look back on my time in undergrad, I'm most proud of a lot of the risks I took that paid off very handsomely. So, you know, leaving my lab at UVA after 2 years when I had gotten so well established, to chase these new positions in fields that were very different to me at the time. It was really personally and psychologically challenging but now I am reaping all the fruits of that decision. I have gotten to have very deep knowledge in quite different fields of biology, picked up a lot of different skills along the way, and I've just been able to meet all these amazing people and work on an incredible variety of projects, which I'm just very proud of. Looking ahead, I hope those unique experiences will inform the kind of research I do, for me to be clear eyed and have a different perspective than those around me. And in the long term, I want to be a compassionate and insightful physician scientist who blends either medical or radiation oncology with cutting edge bench science in a way that makes a meaningful impact on human health. And I'm looking forward also to mentoring trainees, and I hope that I'll be a good advisor who raises plenty of great graduate and medical students.

(00:37:28) Ono: So Deniz, I'm speechless. All four of you: Deniz, Campbell, Sam, Catherine. For listeners, you've heard this conversation with just about the best we have at the University of Virginia academically but also, I think in terms of hope for the future, these are our future leaders. As much as we like talking about how UVA is Thomas Jefferson's university, which is complicated, and as much as we like the image of the Rotunda or the mystery of the secret societies that define the university, make no mistake, I think what this episode is about will be, in the future that UVA will be remembered for training these four very special people. So thank you for being here. They say it takes a village to raise a person. For me personally, I owe many debts, My family, professors like Paul Sally and Basil Gordon, and so many others that I personally owe many thanks to. For the four of you in order, and I'll point to you in order, this is your moment here on Hoos in STEM, your Oscars moment. Who would you like to thank? For everyone to hear, I'll start with you, Deniz.

(00:38:45) Olgun: I am immensely grateful for my mom and the many sacrifices she made to help me get where I am now in terms of spending time taking me to so many extracurriculars when I was young and supporting me financially all throughout college Additionally, I'm grateful for all of my mentors: at Virginia Tech, Matt Buczynski; at UVA, Alban Gaultier; at Harvard, Will Hwang; and finally at UCSF, Hani Goodarzi and Vijay Ramani, who have all in their own ways, you know made a leap in having me on, when I'm stepping up to the next stage of my research and have been so kind to me and so helpful for my intellectual development.

(00:39:27) Ono: Campbell, your Oscars moment.

(00:39:29) Coleman: Oh, man. Who to thank? There's so many. I think first and foremost, my mom. She made, like Deniz just said, she made a lot of sacrifices when I was younger so that I could get a great education; my high school Physics teacher Chad Thurman, who taught me that the pursuit of science is a worthwhile endeavor and fun in of itself. I'd also like to thank my research advisors at UVA, Kevin Pelphrey, Meghan Puglia, and Jack Van Horn, who've shown me how there's a place for me in science and a place for my research interests in medicine, and then the physicians who've mentored me as well, Dr Jason Sheehan, who's a neurosurgeon at UVA, who approaches medicine like a mad scientist, which is how I want to approach medicine, and then Dr Jay Wellons, who's a neurosurgeon at Vanderbilt, who showed me how you can combine medicine with community involvement. All these individuals have taken so much time to help me grow as a professional and I can't wait to call them colleagues one day. Thank you.

(00:40:34) Thank you, Campbell. Sam, your Oscars moment. Who would you like to thank here, right now for everyone to hear?

(00:40:42) Crowe: Yeah. Yeah, so first and foremost, I'll also thank my mom for being my support structure, my rock over the last 22 years but also for letting me hole up in her townhouse for the past year as I finished my last year at UVA. But I'll also thank my mentors, my research mentors Professor Jonathan Tan in the Astronomy department, postdoctoral researchers Yichen Zhang and Rubén Fedriani, also Professor John Bally at CU Boulder, Professor Danny Dale at University of Wyoming, also my History advisors, Professors John Lendon and Elizabeth Meyer, who have taught me more ancient history than I could ever recount in one hour or five hours or 10 hours. I'd also like to thank my friends at University of Virginia, my very close friends, Ryan, Alan, Walker, Nick, Zach, and many more. You know who you are. And yeah, I'd like to thank you Ken for bringing us all on here, and everybody who I have met along the way over these past four years.

(00:41:32) Ono: Well, thank you Sam. and Catherine, your Oscars moment?

(00:41:37) Cossaboom: Yeah, so of course I want to thank my parents and my grandparents for all of their unconditional love and support, and I want to thank Ken for all of his unwavering mentorship over the last four years, the most formative years of my life. I'd like to thank mathematicians Peter Humphries, Evangelia Gazaki, Jesse Thorner, Kathrin Bringmann, and Will Craig, and I'd like to thank my next door neighbor who lives in Pavilion III, Michael Suarez, for being my confidant throughout the Marshall Scholarship process, and of course like all of my friends in the math world at UVA and beyond for standing by me through the inevitable chaos of the life that I chose. So thank all of you for being there for me.

(00:42:22) Ono: Well, Catherine, thank you and thank all of you again. You know, I'm sitting here thinking that it's been a privilege for us. And I kind of woke up this morning kind of in a sour mood and I needed to cheer myself up and you know this conversation totally does that. I remember why now I went into higher education, right, and so thank you for sharing. I think I needed that today. So thank you, Sam Campbell, Catherine, and Deniz. You're obviously not just shining examples of President Ryan's motto, you're role models of what is possible. What's the motto? To be great and good in all that we do. I mean the stories here, they speak for themselves. And so, on behalf of the entire UVA community, I offer you Godspeed as you embark on your life journeys. And well, Wahoowa. I'm Ken Ono, STEM Advisor to the Provost and Marvin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics and you've been listening to Hoos in STEM. 

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