Bryan Yavari, a 2024 graduate who majored in neuroscience, has closed the chapter of his collegiate career filled with numerous achievements. Yavari chose to study neuroscience after a years-long interest in the brain, how it works and the research opportunities available to discover what is not yet known about it. During his undergraduate career in SOLS, Yavari led two projects focusing on cancer in the Arizona Cancer Evolution Center. One is a cancer communication study investigating how the public and clinicians communicate about cancer, and the other is an AI prognostic project for skin cancer. He was also a member of a team that studies adaptive therapy to treat colon cancer.

Yavari founded and co-leads the AI prognostics project with Walker Mellon, a graduate student studying data science, analytics and engineering. Their project won the Global Impact award at this year’s Biodesign Fusion conference. The project, titled, “Utilizing LLM Retrieval Augmented Generation for Skin Cancer Prognostics” involves developing a chatbot similar to Chat GPT that is able to provide accurate information regarding skin cancers. Rather than suggesting a diagnosis, the chatbot will provide the information needed for physicians to make a diagnosis. 

Yavari’s team currently has a working prototype of the AI model that uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to obtain scientific information from published, peer-reviewed papers and are collaborating with the Daneshjou Lab at Stanford University for clinical testing. The goal of this technology is to give dermatologists and researchers the necessary tools to make evidence-based decisions through the minimization of bias by making the retrieval of information easier and more efficient.

While he was an undergraduate student, Yavari received the Moeur award in recognition of the 4.0 grade point average he maintained throughout his time at ASU. He also won the Barrett Gold Standard award for community service, as well as the Innovation award from the Fulton Engineering Projects in Community Service program (EPICS). Additionally, Yavari was involved with the School of Life Sciences Undergraduate Research Program (SOLUR) and presented at the BioSci Southwest Symposium.

Outside of SOLS, Yavari’s Honors thesis, directed by Nobel Prize Winner Lee Hartwell, studied the impact of air pollution on human health. He led a group project through EPICS focused on Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, as it has “some of the worst air quality in the world and many don’t have access to electricity,” says Yavari. Yavari merged his skill sets and led the group’s creation of fully autonomous air purification systems, Koyash, to help the residents of Ulaanbaatar breathe clean air inside their homes.

Now that he’s earned his bachelor’s degree from ASU, Yavari’s next steps are to take the MCAT and apply to medical school. Ultimately, “seeing the impact that medical care has on someone's life, especially for people I saw when volunteering in the clinic” is what Yavari says inspired him to pursue medical school. Following his research projects at ASU, he hopes to continue bridging the gap in improving clinical communication between doctors and patients.

To students who are just starting their undergraduate journey in science, or those who are already on their way, Yavari says that the most important advice he learned and would tell others is that “for every experiment or project you participate in, even with failures, you have to have the same unwavering desire to make it happen regardless of any setback - especially in the research field where there's no definitive way to do something. Even if you have to be creative, no matter what mistakes you make, you still have to have the same kind of motivation to do it time after time."
 

School of Life Sciences students ElanaGrace Fernandez and Nabhan Fakrudin are working hard - on and off campus. Through the undergraduate advising office at SOLS, Fernandez and Fakrudin scored internships in their desired career field as undergraduate students. 

Fernandez, an ASU Online student through the Starbucks College Achievement program is majoring in biological sciences and hopes to one day be a dentist and own her own practice. Since October 2023, she has been interning at Comfort Dental in San Diego as a dental assistant. Through her internship, she not only has sharpened her technical skills, she’s also learned a lot about the type of dentist she wants to be, and how she hopes her patients will feel when they sit down at the chair in front of her. 

To achieve her career goals, Fernandez plans on taking after the dentist at the practice she’s interning at. In a business where it patients can feel like they're being nickel and dimed, Fernandez wants to follow in her mentor's footsteps and create trust between she and her patients. She recalls one of her most memorable moments assisting him with an elderly patient who had an unexpected turn of events during what was supposed to be a routine procedure. “When the procedure was over, he told the patient honestly, ‘that was like opening a can of worms, to be frank with you,” Fernandez says. The doctor told him that “he'd treat the patient like his own father,” saying “‘I’m not looking at this like an opportunity for money. You’re a patient who’s part of our family.’” Fernandez hopes that her future patients feel like they’re being treated like family - not just any other patient. 

While working full-time, pursuing her education and participating in an internship, Fernandez says that the best advice she can give is to “enjoy everything that comes with the journey and prioritize your mental health. Through discipline, motivation and taking care of yourself, it is possible to do all these things at once and achieve your goals.”

Fakrudin has studied on ASU’s Tempe campus for four years and will be graduating in May with his bachelor’s of science in molecular bioscience and biotechnology (MBB). At the beginning of his collegiate career, he started at ASU majoring in aerospace engineering. Shortly after starting at ASU, “my grandparents were diagnosed with debilitating life conditions - Parkinson's and Alzheimer's - which was largely the big influence that led me to switch to MBB,” Fakrudin said. 

During his time as an undergraduate student in SOLS, Fakrudin has held two internships. His first was at TGen as part of the Helios Scholarship program, a paid, eight-week summer internship program in biomedical research open to incoming and continuing undergraduate, graduate and medical school students who have studied at an Arizona high school, college or university. Interns in this program work full-time on a research project under the mentorship of a TGen scientist to unravel the genetic components of diabetes, neurological disease and cancer.

Currently, Fakrudin is an intern at the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine’s Center for Applied NanoBioscience and Medicine in downtown Phoenix. “I think it's a very interdisciplinary research focused center,” says Fakrudin. “We have things from plant research to cellular research where we grow cells in organ-on-chip systems and designing and developing models for therapeutics that are in clinical testing stages are among many things that we do at the center.”

Specifically, Fakrudin works “on the human blood brain barrier organ on chip system where we use iPSCs that are differentiated into the human blood-brain barrier and we're actually working on an accelerated differentiation pathway to make that faster.”

For students interested in internships, Fakrudin’s advice is to “never stop asking professors and advisors about opportunities or ways to grow your network. In my personal experience, faculty have always been eager to help me make connections or write letters of recommendation. You never know until you ask!”