Hello! It was so great to see everyone at the recent ARCS luncheon at ASU's University Club! I'd like to share with the ARCS community an amazing experience I had over the summer:

A little over a year ago, some of the leading researchers in synthetic biology decided to start a synthetic biology course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Because it’s such a young field, these leaders saw it fit to have young faculty teach the course. My advisor, Dr. Karmella Haynes, was one of four chosen to design and run the inaugural course. And she asked me to bring my research project, supported by ARCS, to CSHL as the basis of our lessons.

CSHL is world-renowned for its field-changing research, Nobel laureates, and its courses. A CSHL course is designed for professors, postdoctoral researchers, and advanced graduate students to come learn about a new field over a few intense weeks. Students have gone on to do amazing things in the field they learned about. 

It was humbling and invigorating to be on that campus and to share my research with experts in their own fields. I learned an incredible amount and made some great friends and connections. Knowing that the ARCS Foundation believes in me and my project gave me the confidence to build this course around my research. A million thanks to everyone at ARCS for your generosity and support.