From Speech and Hearing to Farmer’s Markets
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Lara Cardy
B.S. Biochemistry, 2009
Lara just finished her BS in biochemistry. She is one of the three 2008 Goldwater Scholarship winners from ASU. She will start a Ph.D. program in the Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis in Fall 2009.
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 began my ASU career as a Speech and Hearing Science student with designs on becoming a speech pathologist or audiologist, with a goal of working with students with developmental disabilities. Starting my sophomore year in high school, I was part of an international organization, Best Buddies, that placed developmentally disabled students in one-on-one friendships with their typically-functioning peers. I was buddies with two students, one with Down’s Syndrome and the second with cerebral palsy, both of whom had bigger personalities and hearts than the average student. As president of Best Buddies, I created friendships for these students and spent every morning with them as a teaching assistant for their moderately mentally disabled class. One day in this class, all of our students were checking out books from the library, except Lindsey, an autistic girl who forgot to return her last book. She grew angry waiting and began stripping down. First her shirt, then her shorts, and she clearly had no intention of stopping there. Each day as a teaching assistant was certainly an adventure, but this experience encouraged me to take up my first paying job at a summer camp for severely mentally disabled children who were non-verbal, wore diapers, suffered from seizures, and ate only through feeding tubes. The best thing about the summer camps is that our participants were treated like normal kids- we went swimming and bowling, made arts and crafts, and had movie days. All of the activities, especially swimming and bowling, were a lot of work for us counselors- strapping all of our students in wheelchairs on the buses and arranging their floating devices once at the pool- but were tons of fun once the work was done.
As a freshman in speech and hearing science enrolled in a graduate-level course on Pervasive Developmental Disorders, specifically autism, I challenged myself to learn about the population I had been working with for years at the highest academic level. I became my professor’s research assistant, exploring the impact of sign language on word acquisition in autistic children and joined a graduate early-intervention team for a two-year old autistic girl. While I was involved in Applied Behavioral Analysis, speech, and feeding therapy, with this client, I became acutely aware of the strengths and weaknesses of therapeutic approaches. Frustrated with aspects of behavioral intervention, I stepped entirely out of my comfort zone and became an intern with the Neurogenomics Division of the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) to explore the molecular basis of autism. I soon discovered western blots, microarrays, sequencing, and genotyping and I was hooked and became a biochemistry student immediately!
Now that I have made what was a terrifying change in academic disciplines from speech and hearing science to biochemistry, I’m preparing to make yet another transition into neuroscience. Beginning in the fall, I will be a Ph.D. student in the Neuroscience program at the University of California, Davis. Now, I am not only facing more change in my academic area, I will be facing large changes in my surroundings as I become one of only eight students entering the program this fall. After thriving on the constant energy of ASU’s large student body, becoming a part of a small community will be refreshing, and, I expect, somewhat lonely. Among all this change, I am looking forward to embracing the next steps in my academic career in a community that celebrates its bicycle culture and farmer’s markets. |
Chenxiang Lin
Ph.D. Chemistry, 2009
"The reason why Chenxiang is one of the most productive students (he has more than 10 first author papers published) in my group is that he always thinks about control experiments carefully before doing them. Chenxiang is going to Harvard Medical School for a Postdoc position. I am very proud of him". - Prof. Hao Yan, Chenxiang's Advisor. |
 y graduate career started in the spring of 2005, when I came to ASU to pursue a PhD degree in Chemistry. Attracted by the idea of using DNA as a nano-scale building material, and Dr. Hao Yan's strong publication record, I joined his laboratory immediately after my arrival. After the first week of excitement about my new life, I found myself facing two major challenges. First, I needed to improve my English, and second, I had to learn as much as I could about the research topics in the Yan lab, which were totally new to me. Fortunately, I was not alone; the department offered me all the help I needed to get me on the right track. Dr. Ian Gould made tremendous efforts to help me improve my spoken English; he corrected my pronunciation, taught me how to pass the SPEAK test, and most importantly, built my confidence so that I could talk with others in English without hesitation. Dr. Hao Yan and Dr. Yan Liu patiently taught me how to design simple DNA nanostructures, trained me in all of the basic lab techniques, and helped me with troubleshooting when I stared to work on my initial projects. With their help, I passed the SPEAK test after the first semester and my first publication came out after my first year. The smooth start made me believe that I was ready for more challenges.
My entire graduate career was never lacking in challenges, and I enjoyed working out the solutions to each one. Dr. Yan always gave me projects that allowed me to grow as a scientist. He is an incredibly creative chemist and he constantly fed me with novel and inspiring research ideas. He is also a great mentor who helped me learn how to turn original ideas into detailed research plans. He never let me rest on what I had already achieved, instead, he kept reminding me of the ultimate goal of the research and encouraged me to constantly think about the next step. As a result, my 250-page-long dissertation described a series of innovative and systematic studies on building self-assembled water-soluble nanoarrays for biosensing and the replication of artificial DNA nanostructures using biological methods.
I am currently at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute & Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow. In the future, I plan to stay in the academic world and perform interdisciplinary research that bridges the fields of nanoscience and biochemistry, with the ultimate goal of developing medical applications of nanotechnology in biological systems. My graduate studies in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry & The Biodesign Institute at ASU allowed me to mature as a scientist and have prepared me well for my future career. In addition to the scientific knowledge and experimental skills, I learnt how to establish collaborations on and off campus, how to write research articles and reviews, how to give professional talks at conferences, and how to write grant proposals. These are the invaluable possessions that I gained in the fruitful and enjoyable journal that was my four and a half year graduate career at ASU. |
