I was born an orthodox scientist, plopped out onto a conveyer belt of conventional academic promise. My mom was a renowned molecular biologist and mentor who nurtured my scientific curiosity from a young age, who explained cells while we sat around the dinner table, who told me tales of photosynthesis catalyzing the conversion of carbon dioxide to sugar and oxygen when I was only 5 years old.

“What’s carbon dioxide?” I would ask.

“Great question!” my mom would exclaim with contagious enthusiasm. “The whole universe, everything you can see, feel, and touch, is made up of atoms…” She grabbed my arm and said “If you zoom in to your skin, you’ll find it’s made up of living bubbles called cells. If you zoom into cells, you’ll see they’re made up of even smaller things called molecules – fats, proteins, sugars, nucleic acids – and if you zoom into molecules, you’ll see they’re made up of building blocks called atoms. Carbon dioxide is a molecule, made up of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. Most of the air we breathe is made up of carbon dioxide…when we breathe in, we breathe in oxygen, and when we breathe out, we breathe out carbon dioxide…” She would go on, connecting the air I breathe out to the air plants breathe in to the sugars I ate in my cereal.

Suffice to say, born with such raw scientific privilege of a brilliant mom, I did well in school. I loved everything I studied, majored with two degrees – biology and applied mathematics – and almost had minors in chemistry and psychology. I did research as an undergraduate and I was accepted into a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. I applied for many PhD programs and was accepted at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and more. I received a PhD from Princeton in a quick 4.5 years studying under a famous advisor – Dr. Simon Levin – and I went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University.