Note: This story is part of an ongoing series profiling graduate students in the School of Life Sciences. See October's featured students here. 

Eboni Elaine Andersun – Biology and Society PhD, History and Philosophy of Science 

When Eboni Andersun was a kid, she dreamed of being a doctor. She drew pictures of all the patients she’d save one day and spent hours obsessively writing “Dr. Andersun” in cursive on her papers.  

“I was a precocious child,” she laughs.  

Throughout her undergraduate degree at ASU, she stayed interested in human health but realized that being a doctor might not be the right path for her: “I didn’t only want to be able to serve people who could see me at my facility, who had the right insurance. I wanted to serve populations.”  

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This especially became clear to Andersun when she took a class on HIV with Damien Salamone, who teaches both the microbiology of the virus, as well as the historical and social impacts, like how HIV disproportionately impacts People of Color. After that, Andersun enrolled in another course where she wrote articles on the history of herpes and gonorrhea for the Embryo Project Encyclopedia. That work made it extra clear how not only HIV, but most sexually transmitted infections, are highly stigmatized and misunderstood to the point where many people don’t know about available preventions and treatments for these overwhelmingly common infections. Black women compared to women of other races are especially susceptible to contracting STIs like HIV, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and others.

“As a Black woman myself, I’m a part of this very vulnerable population. I couldn’t imagine all the women that look like me, that sound me like me, that speak like me, that come from the same place as me, not having the knowledge that I do and being especially vulnerable to these STIs that are preventable, that are treatable, that are sometimes curable. I knew I wanted to fix it.” 

Andersun’s work doing research with the Embryo Project opened doors for her to continue onto her PhD at ASU. She was awarded an Enrichment Fellowship from the School of Life Sciences in her first year, which gave her the freedom to prepare for her dissertation without working as a TA. She spent much of that year working with the ForkHPV! project, which organized a multidisciplinary group of 86 Barrett Honors students to study HPV from different angles and culminated in a university-wide vaccination event.  

Andersun plans to use her PhD to design research-based interventions around preventing or treating STIs for Women of Color in Phoenix. She hasn’t decided which STI she’ll focus on yet, but she knows she wants her project to prioritize the knowledge of local communities in hopes of actually reducing the disparities of disease occurrence. She hopes this will lead her to a career of designing research-based interventions that have real world outcomes with organizations like the Centers for Disease Control or the National Institutes of Health. 

“I want to reduce disparities, and help heal the relationship between researchers and communities, members of the public that have historically been exploited by research, and people that have not benefitted from research in the past. That’s my goal.”  

Andersun surely has an exciting career ahead. But in many ways, even getting to the point of doing a PhD is a dream come true.  

“I’m the first person in my family to even get a bachelor’s degree, so it’s so surreal to be getting a PhD... I’m pursuing my doctor dreams, just in a different way.” 

Andersun also emphasizes the role her mother Elaine played in her journey, who passed away before Andersun finished her bachelor’s. “I know all of this is due to my mother. She’s who I work for, and I see her in every woman I want to serve.” 

Susan Albor –– Microbiology PhD  

Susan Albor spends many of her days at the Desert Botanical Garden, tending to her propagated cottonwood trees that she’s collected from various sites around Arizona. While she’s interested in learning about the cottonwood trees, she’s more interested in the soil they grow in, and the many microbes that live there. In her PhD, she hopes to understand how different soil microbes help cottonwood trees adapt to environmental stressors, especially extreme heat. 

“A lot of people have focused on the relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and plants. Cottonwoods are one of those plants that have important mycorrhizal associations. But there’s been less of an emphasis on other microbes in the soil. I’m hoping to fill that gap.” 

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Albor didn’t start out with a specific passion for soil microbiology; she could’ve been happy with almost any ecological work. Like many biologists, Albor learned to love nature through her childhood experiences outdoors. She became curious about the land that she got to know through family hikes and camping trips in the Midwestern US, but she was also influenced by land that she never got to know: the land that her parents and grandparents called home. 

“I would hear my family talk about their experiences in Mexico, and what it looked like there. Interacting with nature was just part of their everyday experience. And I think I had this longing to know nature the way they did.”  

Albor especially grew attentive to plants through her family: “I think that’s another cultural thing, you know? Your aunts and your mom are always exchanging plants and talking about them and getting really excited when someone has a rare plant. I think that just really increased my appreciation for them.” 

When Albor started her undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois, Chicago, she enrolled as a double major in biology and environmental sciences, dreaming of doing environmental research. She knew to get to that career she’d have to start getting research experience. Unpaid internships weren’t an option for her, though; to pay for school, she was always working on the side. But one day, the perfect job came along: a student worker position in the university greenhouse.  

“It felt like my dream job. And like a step in the right direction, like something that would get me to where I needed to be.” 

With the connections she made at the greenhouse, Albor got deeper into biology research. She spent the next summer working at the University’s experimental plot of native tallgrass prairie, researching the relationship between monarchs and milkweed. The year after that, she got accepted into the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program doing soil microbiology research. That experience made her not only curious about plants, but about the soil they grew in.  

Albor was awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, one of the most prestigious graduate student research fellowships, to pursue her PhD at ASU studying soil microbiology. It’s been a winding road so far, as she’s been looking for the right spaces and people to work with to do the research she wants. She’s landed somewhere interdisciplinary, designing her own experiments to try and bring soil microbiology and botany together –– a route that not every PhD student takes, which can be both exciting and frightening.  

Albor speaks more candidly than most about the uncertainties that come with doing a PhD. She’s honest about not being sure what the path ahead is. Even so, one thing is clear: she’s already an environmental researcher. Every day that she works with her soil samples and propagated cottonwoods, she learns more about the land she lives on and the many species –– visible and invisible –– that she shares it with, which is what she’s been working for all along. 

Note: This story is part of an ongoing series profiling graduate students in the School of Life Sciences. See March’s featured students here.  

The research that goes on in the School of Life Sciences spans a huge and fascinating variety of subjects. The graduate students who make up SOLS are no less diverse or interesting, arriving at their respective research from different places and with different passions. Here, we recognize a handful of these graduate students, their work and what motivates them to pursue it. 

Allison Hays – Neuroscience 

Our childhood experiences have a huge impact on the rest of our lives; they shape our beliefs about the world, the relationships we form, and our physical and mental health well into adulthood. Allison Hays, a second-year neuroscience PhD student in the BEAR Lab, is diving deeper into understanding how our experiences are so impactful by exploring their interaction with genetics. 

Hays specifically thinks about how childhood experiences affect certain cognitive functions, like the ability to remember things, pay attention, and switch easily from one task to another. But rather than looking at the brain to figure this out, she looks at our spit––the easiest way for her to get samples of DNA. When she looks at spit samples, she doesn’t just try to read the DNA they contain; she’s more interested in seeing how the DNA within them is being regulated. Specifically, she looks for occurrences of DNA methylation, which is a modification that prevents gene expression.  

“We don't have all of our DNA being expressed at one time. There are things that turn gene expression on and off, or up and down.. So, what we look at is not necessarily what genes you are given, but what genes are on, off, up, down, etcetera. So that's then going to affect... your biology, your health, and cognition. I specifically think about how stressful experiences can be associated with poorer health and different rates of development and aging- which may ultimately go on to impact a variety of things.” 

So, Hays measures the cognitive performance of her research subjects, assesses how stressful their early childhood experiences were and looks at what genes are turned on or off in the DNA in their spit samples. With all that information together, Hays can start to understand how early childhood stress can change gene expression and affect cognitive performance. 

This holistic look at stress, genetics and brain function altogether excited Hays, who conducted related research with the Arizona Twin Project and the Memory Attention Control lab at ASU as an undergraduate. Now, she’s conducting novel work that she hopes will one day improve how scientists assess and improve humans’ health and wellbeing.  

“I think it will be extremely important for assessing people's level of health risks depending on their childhood stress levels, and monitoring whether any types of treatments or interventions are working... By looking at the gene expression, we’ll finally be able to see on a genetic level which treatments are working and which are not.” 

Isabel Torres – Environmental Life Sciences 

Arizonans might think they’re well-acquainted with the desert, having lived among its summer monsoons, soaring temperatures, and temperamental dust storms. But most Arizonans have no idea why the desert is important. 

Not Isabel Torres. The second year PhD student in the Throop lab is dedicating her research to better understanding deserts and other dryland ecosystems, which most people have overlooked.  

“Deserts are amazing. People think that there's nothing living or going on there. But there's so much activity.” 

A third of the world’s human population already lives on drylands, or ecosystems like deserts defined by water scarcity, and that number will only increase: by the end of the century, drylands will likely make up 56% of Earth’s land cover, Torres explains. To protect the people who depend on drylands, scientists must understand how to best manage and care for that land. But that’s not something they currently understand. 

Torres plans to help correct that. She’s spending her PhD doing field work to study how carbon cycles through dryland ecosystems, which is important for scientists who make models that predict what the climate will look like in the future. Current climate models for dryland ecosystems rely on data collected from other ecosystem types, which is troubling –– it means that those models are inaccurate. Torres aims to generate data that can be used to make accurate climate models, which will help land managers take care of the land. 

That goal, Torres shares, is inspired by her hometown: “I grew up in El Paso, Texas. It’s a desert. But it wasn’t always a desert. Back in the 1800s, it was a grassland. It was pretty and beautiful. But then they overgrazed the landscape, leading to desertification... So, I’m really interested in land management practices and how we can take care of the land.” 

Torres recognizes that living on drylands is tough: water and other resources are scarce, so people must work to prevent desertification where they can. At the same time, she loves the desert, and though she knows life there is tough, she doesn’t want that to stop people from seeing how much the land still gives us. She hopes her work can help people protect the land in return. 

Note: This story is part of an ongoing series profiling graduate students in the School of Life Sciences. See February’s featured students here.  

The research that goes on in the School of Life Sciences spans a huge and fascinating variety of subjects. The graduate students who make up SOLS are no less diverse or interesting, arriving at their respective research from different places and with different passions. Here, we recognize a handful of these graduate students, their work, and what motivates them to pursue it. 

Jules Petty – Environmental Life Sciences Program 

You might think that climate scientists mostly think about what’s around and above us, in our atmosphere. But Jules Petty, a second year PhD student, studies climate by going underground and looking at our soil. 

“I choose to study soil because I think it’s a pretty strong way of interpreting how an ecosystem is functioning... Being able to identify the processes [occurring in the soil] and understand them... can give us a picture of what is happening more broadly.”  

Petty will be collaborating with Yiqi Luo’s Eco Lab at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to help create accurate computer-generated models of how carbon cycles through an ecosystem.  

“Modeling is just how to simplify the snapshots of data that we get into one cohesive story. We can look at the old theories of what people thought [about] how carbon cycled in the past and improve upon those stories with new data.” 

Petty specifically looks at ways to model how carbon cycles through the soil in dryland ecosystems, or ecosystems characterized by a lack of water, like much of Arizona. Drylands make up a huge portion of the Earth’s surface –– about 40 percent –– but are very understudied as far as how carbon cycles through the ecosystem, according to Petty.  

As the species living in dryland ecosystems shift along with climate change, it’s important for scientists to understand how those changes will affect the way carbon cycles in drylands, Petty says: “We know humans can’t exist without the natural resources our world’s ecosystems provide. Now that we are seeing important ecosystems changing, it’s critical to understand where they are going and how they can still support our communities sustainably.” 

Petty hopes that their research will help land-use managers in drylands make decisions about how to protect their land in the future. 

Jarrett Joubert – Biology and Society Program, History and Philosophy of Science track 

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s changed the medical field and the social status of queer people forever. Jarrett Joubert, a third year PhD student, hopes to learn more about the decisions that scientists had to make when trying to treat the deadly epidemic –– decisions that have affected the lives of tens of thousands of people. 

“My research will be telling the story of how [HIV] drugs were developed, specifically why scientists chose to pursue one class of drugs over another.” 

Joubert has a personal stake in this subject: “I’m a queer Black man... [belonging to] a group that has some of the highest risk factors for HIV. I always think about HIV –– even if I don’t want to –– because it's a script that’s been put on my body. That’s why I’m so interested in researching this.” 

Joubert was recently accepted into Knowledge of AIDS, an NSF-funded research community development project creating a network amongst scholars who study HIV/AIDS. As part of the network, Joubert will have the chance to attend yearly workshops around the US with interdisciplinary HIV/AIDS researchers.  

“I’m excited because as a graduate student... you’re [working] by yourself so much. This [opportunity] will enable me to talk to a lot of other people who care about the same stuff, but study it in a different way.” 

As Joubert learns more about how scientists made decisions when developing HIV treatments, being part of the network will help him connect that history to its broader social impacts, which still affect people like him today.