This is a post about how I got to where I am today. This about my transformative years at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. (>20 minute read)

A common cliche in the US is that college (undergraduate studies) is the best four years of someones life. I argue that this viewpoint is often too narrow to describe the true nature and transformative power of a college education. For me, college was full of ups and downs, struggling to find my place as a person and as a scientist, balancing a social life in a world renowned city with rigorous courses, and the loss of one of my best friends in my last semester of college. These experiences taught me the skills needed to succeed and stay motivated in graduate school. In this blog post I will talk about my four years of undergraduate studys at the College of Charleston (CofC) and how it led to where I am today.

The Spark Ignites

To get an idea about how I chose to go to the College of Charleston, we have take a step back and examine my high school years for a brief moment. To add a little perspective I must add that I went to a small 1A high school, Blacksburg High School, in the upstate of South Carolina with a graduating class of about 110. In high school, I was a member of the marching band for six years, on the wrestling team for two years (which I was not very good at), threw shotput and discus on the track and field team for one year, was on the academic quiz bowl team, and an AP/duel enrollment student. I took every AP class that was available at the time: English Composition and Literature, Calculas AB, and Psychology. By far my favorite (and also one of the two I did not pass the AP exam on) was AP Calculus AB. Growing up, I had always loved math and science but calculus was when I truly began to understand how mathematics could help explain the physical world around us. I had always loved reading popular science books and magazines but I was always left wanting by the lack of mathematical explaination offered in most books. The book that helped cement my budding love of mathematics and married the concepts I had learned in AP Calculus and in popular science books was Love and Math: The Art of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel. In this book Frenkel, an émigré of the former Soviet Union, compares our current understanding of mathematics to learning to paint but only being able to paint simple things like a white picket fence when really mathematics should be compared to famous works of art such as a The Stary Night by Vincent van Gogh. The book goes down a wonderful path from the discrimination he faced in the former Soviet Union to working on the Langlands Program (considered to being the Grand Unified Theory of mathematics by many mathematicians) as a professor in the United States. A defining moment in my high school career was when I emailed Robert Langlands, the father of the Langlands program and who occupations Einstein’s former office at the Institute for Advanced Study, with an extremely naive, high school level question about the Grand Unified Theory of mathematics and how it could relate to the Grand Unified Theory of physics. He responded the next day and said that it was not very likely that there was any relationship between the two. Depsite my question being naive, his response was transformative for me because this legend in mathematics took the time to email me back! This showed me that mathematics was accessible to someone like me, a kid from rural South Carolina, who did not have all of the fancy AP/IB/duel enrollment courses available at other schools.

With this and my love for pop physics in mind, I knew I wanted to go into a STEM field… I just did not know what STEM field to choose. I was accepted to a handful of schools, both in state and out of state, but once I visited the College of Charleston I knew that as the place for me. I chose the College of Charleston for a variety of reasons: proximity to the beach, campus being in the middle of a small, metropolitan city, proximity to the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC, if I wanted to go to medical school), and for the shrimp and grits!

The Metamorphosis

Not knowing what STEM field to go into yet, I tentatively chose astrophysics but was leaning towards a pre-medicine related major such as biochemistry or biology. Freshman year I enrolled in a First Year Experience (FYE) course for pre-medicine students, a dual course FYE which included introductory chemistry and biology for students interested in the pre-medicine route. I was severely unprepared for the stress and workload of college and struggled tremendously in both courses, along with Calculus I. The professors of the three STEM courses I was taking at the time were amazing and extremely helpful but one dramatically changed and shaped the current path I am on. I ended up passing general chemistry by the skin of my teeth after many office hours in Dr. Riggs-Gelasco’s office (who is also chair the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry). I had been spiraling, looking for direction and did not know if mathematics, chemistry, physics, or biology were for me. During one of my office hour visits with Dr. Riggs-Gelasco, I had expressed my confusion and search for direction into which STEM field to choose, I do not remember all the details, but I remember talking a little bit about Richard Feynman and I immediately changed my major to biochemistry (I would later change it to chemistry my junior year). I did not quite understand why I was attracted to the field of chemistry but I knew it could help explain important problems related to our understanding of life on other planets, climate change, and industrial process lithium-ion batteries, medicine, etc.

The next semester I took general chemistry II, general biology II, and vector calculus with chemical applications, a five credit our course for chemist with a broad overview of calculus II-III, linear algebra, group theory, and ordinary differential equations. This course, along with a visit to our campus research fair are what cemented the path I had started down the semester before and am still journeying on still to this day. At the spring research fair, I had talked to several chemistry and biology professors from CofC, a few researchers based out of MUSC, and one mathematics professor. Most professors, except for the mathematics professor, had told me I need to take organic chemistry, molecular biology, or biochemistry before I could start research with them. The mathematics professor, Dr. Garrett Mitchener, had peaked my attention by talking about the strange world of mathematical biology. He told me about projects related to the biological evolution of both speech and genetics. We discussed topics like how to simulate artificial life and how mathematics could help describe the world around us. I told him, I may not have all the required background courses or knowledge but I was willing to work hard and learn whatever he wanted me to learn inorder to start doing research with him that summer. Soon after, I declared a minor in mathematics and the path was set, I had a direction for which I was now heading.

The Path Defined

Coastal summers were soul crushing. Floods, temperatures often rising above 100 ºF, tropical storms, and the beating sun were common. Walking into the Robert Scott Smalls building, a former campus library in the heart of campus in Cougar Mall, on my first day of research, during the summer of 2015, I was sweaty and nervous. I did not know what to expect from my research mentor or the project that I was going to try to complete. Arriving a little earlier than expected, I sat and stared at the graduate school and study abroad posters that line the hallway to ease my nerves. When it was five minutes before the time I was supposed to arrive, I nervously knocked on Dr. Mitchener’s door. We chatted about the task at hand, where to start, and meeting with our collaborator’s Dr. Thomas Naselaris and his post-doc at the time, Dr. Ghislan St.-Yves, from MUSC. Dr. Mitchener handed me a packet on Mathematica, the mathematical software language that I would use for the project, and a copy of An Introduction of Natural Computation by Dana H. Ballard. That first week, I learned the basics of Mathematica, neural networks, and about predictive coding in the visual cortex (based on Rao, R., Ballard, D. Nat Neurosci 2, 79–87 (1999)). That summer I worked for six weeks on A Mathematical Model of Mental Imagery. In this project we tried to use the tools of machine learning to build a biologically inspired neural network to model mental imagery. During this summer I learned a lot and was the sole undergradute in the room with three PhDs during our meetings with collaborators. This made me feel like I had a place in the world to do research and that my opinion was respect. The mentorship and guidance from Dr. Mitchener allowed me to present at several different poster sessions and at a Department of Mathematics weekly colloquium during my sophomore year.

After the first summer of research, I found a passion for mathematics and how it could describe complex systems in the world around us. I knew at the time, that the following summer (the summer between my sophomore and junior year) that I wanted to continue doing reseach and working with Dr. Mitchener. The summer project following my sophomore year, A Mathematical Model of Dynamic Vision, was similar to my first project yet more complex project since we were trying to model hallucinations associated with diseases like Charles Bonnet syndrome. This project was more complex because we had to create moving images in order to get our machine learning model to hallucinate. That year I presented at another weekly Department of Mathematics colloquium. In the spring of my junior year, I presented a poster on A Mathematical Model of Dynamic Vision and won an award at the Spring 2017 School of Science and Mathematics poster session for having the best poster in the Department of Mathematics as a chemistry major!

During the spring of junior year, I was taking general physics II and the professor Dr. Alem Teklu had heard about my research project that had won an award at the poster session. After class one day he asked me if I wanted to collaborate with him on a complex diffraction experiment that had peaked his interest. As always, I knew I wanted to continue working with Dr. Mitchener and asked if we could collaborate on this project with Dr. Teklu. The three of us started to communicate about how we would go about this project, since it was quite ambitious, and Dr. Mitchener wanted to include Daniel Rich, an undergraduate from his Mathematical Modeling course, on the project. The project was an intersection between an acoustical and optical experiment where weird dynamical effects, proclaimed to be chaotic, occured. What made this project so interesting is that the optical set up was perpendicular to a pulsing ultrasonic microphone in water. When the light passed through the tank of water, where the ultrasonic microphone was pulsing, light began to diffract and as the amplitude of the ultrasounds increased, the light supposedly descended into chaotic patterns. I say supposedly because we could never prove that the system exihibited any chaos associated with period doubling bifurications. On the social aspect of the project, tensions were initially high between Daniel and I, since I had never collaborated with another undergraduate before and I wanted all the potential glory for myself. In retrospect, I know that was not a good look at the time but it allowed me to grow as a person and helped show me that science and mathematics are team sports. The irony of the whole situation is that Daniel became one of my best friends, I love that dude like a brother and I still send him annoying texts, beat him at 8ball phone games, and send him dumb memes. After becoming friends, the two of us gave a colloqium talk in the Department of Mathematics, like I had done solo the two years before. The best part of this story is that we had a happy ending. We later went on to win the award for having the math poster at the Spring 2018 School of Science and Mathematics poster sesson and went on to the finals and finished in second place behind a biology poster. Team work really made the dream work.

One thing I have to mention is that there was a dark side to my summers of research. Outside of research, what shaped me the most during the summers was how grueling it was on my mental health. I suffered severe depression and anxiety from the monotony of the work day and the loneliness I experienced after the work day during the first two summers of research. Working eight hours a day, five days a week, when you are basically by yourself outside of work was very hard. Without the support of family members, friends, and my mentor Dr. Garrett Mitchener I would have never experienced the joys and intellectual fulfillment I get from doing research. I had to embrace the mundane, monotony, and “boring” research days. During the first two summers, reading, running, walking, and watching netflix are what got me through the lonely evenings after work. What got me through my last summer of research was going to the beach, surfing, and hanging out with my friends. I was never really good at surfing but it was always nice to be out on the water… except for that one time I saw a shark next to me (YIKES).

The Finish Line

Up until the fall of my senior year (2017), I was determined I was going to go to graduate school to get a PhD in Mathematical Biology. What really changed my mind was Physical Chemistry I, which focused on statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, and kinetics, and the idea of taking Physical Chemistry II, quantum mechanics, in spring of 2018. I did not really have an understanding of what quantum mechanics but during the fall semester I started doing computational chemistry research with Dr. Gamil Gurgius. I was using Møller-Plesset Second-Order Perturbation Theory, a post Hartree-Fock method, to understand the geometric conformations of five member silane rings. With research in machine learning, mathematical physics, and computation chemistry under my belt I knew that I wanted to combine my love for the three when I got to graduate school. I applied to a handful of schools, mainly in the south, and was looking for a mentor who would allow me to do all three. I lucked out, got into the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and signed my contract to go there before I ever visited. I graduate from the College of Charleston on May 12, 2018 and started my graduate school journey soon after.

Setting Sun and New Horizons

I left the city and friends I loved dearly, for the chance to make my name as a theoretical and computational chemist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Despite how much I miss Charleston and my fellow Charlestonians, I have progressed both as a professional and as a person in my pursuit of deeper understanding of the world around us. At the university I am advised by Dr. Konstantinos Vogiatzis on a project that is a marriage between computer science, machine learning, and quantum mechanics. I want to use these tools, along with cloud computing, to help make computational chemistry more accessible to researchers around the world and to help us further understand fundamental problems related to climate change.

The truth about research is that it is rarely eureka moments, amazing discoveries, and constant external fulfillment. Research is the grueling process of driving knowledge forward, dragging the field, hell or high water, into the future. It is days of mundane data collection, theorizing, coding, and reading to edge the field forward, just a nudge, so that we can expand our knowledge and understand the universe around us. Without my undergraduate research experiences I would have never been ready for graduate school and the self motivation that is required to succeed. I will forever be indebted to my grade school teachers who believed in me and encourged me to follow my dreams, my college professors, advisors, and mentors who gave me encouraging, sometimes down right honest advice, and who also believed and encouraged me to continue on with my education. On September 4, 2019 I gave my first conference talk in Perugia, Italy. When I first got onto the stage, I stared out into the audience, for a brief moment I visualized all of the people who have believed in me and encourged me throughout my life and also the giants, whose shoulders I now stand on, as I look into the future, towards the vast unknown that is science.