Nevertheless, They Persisted Meet seven extraordinary students graduating into a new world.

It wasn’t easy for Jeannette Gonzales Wright ’16 (PLME), ’20 MD, to grow up in L.A., the child of two parents who are Deaf, one of whom—her mother, Tess—was also a Filipina immigrant. Not only did the family experience financial hardship, with her father sometimes having to ask for money in public when food stamps ran out, but she would often be mocked by other kids while communicating with her parents in American Sign Language (ASL). “People would make  obscene gestures when they saw us communicating,” she says.

The flip side was that her parents brought her up in a vibrant community of Deaf people, with some of her closest friends being other CODAs (children of Deaf adults). When she got to Brown, where she met no Deaf students, she deeply missed that world—until she enrolled in an ASL class. “People who speak English still study it to learn more about it,” she says. “The class gave me a more refined sense of ASL grammar and an updated vocabulary.” The professor, Arkady Belozovsky, who is Deaf, not only introduced her to the rich culture and history of the Deaf community, but instilled in her a sense of pride in her parents and the community she was raised in. “He helped me recognize so many beautiful moments that I’d witnessed.”

The class also attuned her to the fact that many children born deaf are still not identified as such until they are toddlers, which can affect their early education, often setting them back for life. That, she says, was the case with both her parents. She’s currently finishing a thesis, for a masters degree in population medicine she’s been pursuing alongside her MD, on “how parents with deaf or hard-of-hearing kids make decisions for them, such as do they teach them ASL, spoken language, or both. That’s a huge debate.”

By the end of four years at Brown, it’s almost easier to ask what Griffin Kao ’20 hasn’t done. He’s published a book, won the national ultimate frisbee championship, developed numerous apps, helped teach a class, and manufactured his own cheaper version of a FitBit to make health technology accessible to more people. Classmates describe him as one of the friendliest and most thoughtful people they know.

Entering college, Kao quit swimming and devoted himself to the Brownian Motion Ultimate team. A D-Line Cutter (similar to the defensive safety position in football), he remembers having to practice in five layers in the middle of winter when catching the disc stung; the layers stayed on as the weather warmed to prepare for temperatures at the finals in Austin. The training paid off: Brownian Motion crushed widely favored UNC in an upset to become 2019 National Champions.

Off the field, Kao co-authored Turning Silicon Into Gold, a book published by Apress, an IT book publisher, that analyzed a range of case studies on interesting phenomena at the intersection of tech and business (like why the second competitor in a market tends to beat out the first). It wasn’t his first publication—he produced a novel in high school and has been writing since his elementary grades.

Yet what Kao’s really been focused on is using technology to help bring people together and build communities. He’d never studied computer science before Brown but became fascinated with using coding to create platforms and apps that could enhance relationships and encourage personal and professional growth.

“How do we make something that doesn’t replace human interaction but augments it?” Kao asks. He seeks to help make people “more conscious of how they react and how they respond emotionally to the people they know.”

It’s late March, and Ella Satish ’20 (PLME), ’24 MD, who is among the Brown undergrads granted permission to remain in their dorms during the coronavirus crisis, is frustrated that she can’t go help out at Clinica Esperanza. She usually puts in paid time at the nearby community health center as part of her involvement in the Swearer Center’s Engaged Scholars Program, which requires that students do real-life work that links to their classes. Satish, a first-generation-to-college student, is a Latin American and Caribbean Studies concentrator, fluent in Spanish.

“They’re short on people and they need in-person Spanish translators,” she says. “But I have asthma and I’d have to take the bus, so it’s risky for me to go.”

The service-minded impulse is typical of Satish, whose twin passions are healthcare and teaching. Growing up in one of the few Black families in southern New Hampshire, she would often accompany her mother, a nurse, to her night shift at the hospital. “I’d sit around and drink apple juice and look at the monitors,” she says, “which got me into healthcare.” In both high school and college, she worked in an Alzheimer’s/dementia facility, feeding and transporting patients, eventually becoming a certified nursing assistant there.

The interest carried over to studying abroad in Cuba, where she researched the poor Communist country’s maternal mortality rates—which, by some calculations, are lower than those in the U.S., especially for Black women. “There are aspects to the Cuban approach that could improve healthcare even in a capitalist healthcare system like ours,” she says, “such as better holistic supports for the mother, continuity of care across providers, and a focus on primary care and preventive medicine.”

Joseph Novak ’20 arrived at Brown skeptical about climate change. Now, he is helping shape the way scientists study it.

Raised in conservative Raleigh, North Carolina, Novak had been taught to be skeptical of climate change. But after taking a biology course and becoming both frightened and convinced, Novak decided to focus his studies on climate science. He joined the lab of geo-chemistry professor Yongsong Huang, taking on an undergraduate research project that Huang warned him would likely never work.

The goal of Novak’s research was to find a better way to reconstruct past sea surface temperatures, which would help scientists create more accurate models of climate change.

Scientists rely on alkenones, or chemical fats made by algae, to determine past ocean temperatures. When algae die, their alkenone sinks to the bottom of the ocean floor and can survive in the sediment there for millions of years, Novak explains. Algae produce different kinds of alkenones depending on the temperature, and the current method for analyzing alkenones cannot detect them above 28 degrees Celsius. That’s because scientists have mainly studied one type of alkenone that has 37 carbon atoms and used it as an index for past temperature. But there is another form of alkenone with 38 carbon atoms and it has a potentially greater temperature range. Novak was looking for a way to analyze this type of alkenone more efficiently—although it is generally much harder to find and, until only a few years ago, could not be analyzed accurately or at speeds that made it practical to study.

Novak made his breakthrough as a result of a panic in the fall of 2018. He and a grad student working on a separate project were slated to give presentations at an upcoming conference, but data from the algae fat eluded them. Reading through old scientific papers and experimenting with different techniques, they found something that seemed to work—a strong enough filter to remove the rest of the chemicals that are typically found in the sediment, but not so strong as to eliminate the key chemical compounds they wanted to analyze.

“I love Brown,” says Vanessa Garcia ’20.5, a Business, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations (BEO) concentrator with an emphasis on justice for people with disabilities, “but if you’d asked me in 2017, I’d have said I wanted to burn it down, I hated it so much.”

That’s because, in Garcia’s telling, they (Garcia identifies as gender nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns) had a rocky relationship with the University until their student activism changed things for the better. Freshman year Garcia, who grew up in San Diego, was a high-speed superstar, nabbing straight As, making friends left and right, and zooming from activity to activity. But when they returned second semester, they…crashed. “I couldn’t leave my bed for days,” they say. “My friends were scared—they didn’t know how to help.”

Garcia, hospitalized, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a mental illness marked by turbocharged highs and paralyzing suicidal lows. In their telling, the University urged them to go on medical leave without really asking what they wanted. “You can’t really object when they’re handing you a consent form to sign,” Garcia says. Back in California, living with their grandparents, Garcia sought treatment, went on meds, learned to cope with their illness via therapy, and applied for readmission—but was refused (with little explanation, according to Garcia) and not readmitted until after they appealed the denial.

“This was a critical point in my activism,” Garcia says. “I wondered how many talented people in the past never got to graduate” under similar circumstances. Back on campus, initially feeling lonely and out of sync with their freshman-year friends, Garcia found others who’d taken mental-health leave, and started working with LETS (Let’s Erase the Stigma), to advocate on behalf of leave-taking students. Since its 2013 founding by another student, Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu ’17, “We’ve helped shape the entire campus on mental health,” Garcia says. LETS got the University to appoint a student as leave-taking coordinator, someone who would stay in touch with all students on leave. The group also sent care packages to students on leave so they would not feel forgotten by Brown, as Garcia had. According to Garcia, the group also negotiated with Counseling and Psychological Services for a leave-taking and readmittance process that more fully incorporated students’ needs and desires.

Many doctoral dissertations are researched from the comfy confines of a library. Not so for Omar Alcover, ’16 AM, ’20 PhD, whose archaeological study of ancient Mayan civilization required him to travel deep into the forests of northwestern Guatemala.

To even begin his research, Alcover had to fly down to Guatemala City, take a nine-hour bus ride to the edge of the jungle, followed by a three-hour truck journey on uneven roads to the Mexican border, then an hours-long boat ride upstream and, finally, hike up rocky slopes to reach Macabilero, an ancient Mayan site that had long remained an archaeological mystery.

One of the reasons the site is a mystery, Alcover says, is because “people don’t visit it, it’s in the middle of nowhere.” Located within the Sierra del Lacandón National Park, the site has been protected since 1997. But the trek and logistical challenges of the research did not faze Alcover, who had discovered his love of expedition archaeology after spending several months in the Guatemalan jungle doing fieldwork as an undergraduate.

Supported by National Geographic, and working closely with his professors and Guatemalan archaeologists, Alcover organized several expeditions to visit Macabilero, starting in 2016. On top of the research, he had to consider questions like how to feed a camp of 12 people for a month with only those supplies that could be carried in by foot on the first day. Techniques included building a mud oven and stove and keeping veggies covered in lime juice. “Omar’s project represents one of the last few ‘expedition’-style projects in Guatemala,” says anthropology professor and director of undergraduate studies Andrew K. Scherer.

The terrain of craggy hills laced with caves hollowed out from the limestone rock had provided indigenous Mayan communities with a natural defensive landscape, which they adapted by building a massive fortress, constructing walls around every natural entrance point in the surrounding valley. Based on ceramic pieces excavated from the site, Alcover believes the walls were constructed around 175 C.E. and he spent years trying to better understand why and how the defensive space was created.

Ethan Fecht ’20 always had a talent for languages, but he never would have guessed that being good at high school Spanish would allow him to become a counter-terrorism intelligence officer and later an expert in the complex world of cybersecurity.

After high school in Hampton, Virginia, Fecht applied to be a linguist for the U.S. Navy, where he spent the next 18 months mastering Arabic. From 2013 to 2017, he worked for the National Security Agency as a counter-terrorism analyst (“can’t get into details,” he says), along the way picking up Italian, French, and Portuguese.

At Brown, he planned to refine his focus on counter-terrorism, but an intro to international relations class exposed him to cybersecurity. There were a lot of similarities—his old job had required him to intimately understand the infrastructure of the internet and how information travels online.

In the summer of 2018, while on a fellowship at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, he co-authored a 56-page report that analyzed 850,000 tweets in the aftermath of the April 2018 chemical attack by the Syrian government against Douma, a rebel stronghold. Fecht and a fellow researcher revealed a coordinated disinformation campaign of bots and trolls (likely from Russia) that attempted to turn the American public against a U.S. missile strike. Their analysis, later published in the Washington Post, showed a surge of new Twitter accounts created in the week following the attack, nearly half of them devoted to spreading disinformation.

After scraping Twitter data, Fecht and his partner painstakingly reviewed thousands of accounts to determine whether they were fake (usually they could tell because a brand new account would have a few hours of frenzied political commentary and then go dead). The accounts typically tweeted in response to President Trump, allowing them to attain high visibility in the comments.