The product of a first generation Assyrian developer and a pageant-princess-turned-artist, mom and dad transplanted their small family from hobart, indy to freakmont, california in the early 80’s - then came me!
I grew up surrounded with tech that trickled from the Valley into my home. Dad and Uncle would bring back the latest floppy, CD-ROM or game console, while Mom ensured balance by challenging me with her next creative project. I was never bored.
Dad was the director of software development at Incyte Genomics in the 2000’s. He has an extensive software and hardware background with 35+ years of development experience, is entirely self taught, and has dedicated his career to partnering with scientists on building some pretty cool stuff!
A good portion of childhood was admiring Mission Peak from my backyard and commuting to Palo Alto to see what mischief Dad was getting into. An unconventional upbringing, the rest of the time I was learning how to ride dirtbikes, snowboards, or cruising across the dirty delta in our ski boat with my closest friends.
Growing Pains
My natural inclination for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics grew as I attended a magnet school from K-8, where we had annual science fairs (see photo above for collection of my experiments), animal dissections, and of course science camp. Along the way,
I danced, tumbled and cheer leaded pop warner until high school. At West High, I excelled at physiology, chemistry and mathematics just as I did at drawing, painting, speech and debate.
Mom signed me up for a weekly modeling school, Barbizon, where I learned to pose, walk runway and maintain proper dinner etiquette.
In time, I developed a range of skills and interests from modeling, spray painting and airbrushing, to baking professional cupcakes, anchoring the school bulletin, journaling with my camera and going to outer space.
My father, the craft master of elegant persuasion.
After reporting I wanted to go to art school, be a traveling news anchor, or an astronaut, I was talked into considering… computer science, nursing, or …. bioengineering?!
Bioengineering morphed into chemical engineering, and a last-minute-4-year plan was ditched for a 3-year-community-college one, where I could save money, buy time, be close to home, and ultimately work for a degree I wanted. The downside being its risk - confusion over courses, poor professors, or worse yet — the schools I want still don’t accept me. Alas, after that conversation, I completed a year of Spanish at the local community college and was encouraged to keep going.
Learn, lather, rinse, and repeat.
The following 3 years were one long and challenging intellectual growth spurt. I researched up and down, studied left and right, and was spinning in circles between commuting, studying, and tutoring. I signed up for organic chemistry classes at 6:00 AM (I told the dean this shouldn’t be allowed!), took alternate lab times to enable heavy course loads, flooded my schedule with extracurriculars and signed-up for classes and internships every summer. After all, the stakes were high and I wasn’t about to do this for nothing.
I made it to the other side, but not unscathed: I was rushed to the emergency room with a major case of appendicitis during a group of technical finals, which I had to reschedule for the following summer when I was interning. Less than a year later, I experienced a severe mid-semester kidney infection that hospitalized me for two weeks.
Forge ahead and grand opportunities emerge.
A lot of magical events took place in 2013 & 2014 that set the stage for the years to come,
and the chain reaction was all sparked with a flyer for the Transfer-to-Excellence program at my community college. I was so inspired that they were actually giving undergraduate students outside the university, with nearly no experience, the opportunity to participate for 3 months. It was dream come true for me, as I had unsuccessfully cold emailed Ron Zuckerman at the molecular foundry of LBNL, and Kate Rubins, former biologist who became an astronaut.
I was looking for someone to take a chance on me, and was more than ready to prove myself. And that I did - I was accepted and the subsequent recommendation got me into MIT’s summer research program. These experiences hammered molecular biology, synthetic biology, and wet lab techniques home. In parallel, I was offered a synthetic biology specialist position at a microfluidics startup, and then an internship at DuPont Industrial Biosciences.
