When I joined Phi Sigma Pi at Georgia Tech in December 2022, our chapter had five active members. The service-based honor fraternity had lost momentum after COVID, and was in danger of folding. I had not expected to lead it, but I could see that preserving the chapter meant preserving what its members could do for others. Three months later, I ran for president and was elected. At first, serving others meant keeping the chapter alive. When I returned from Georgia Tech-Europe the following summer, our recruitment officer vanished without notice. I organized a week of events that nearly doubled our membership. The work taught me that leadership was less about being indispensable than about drawing people in. Every new member gave the chapter more capacity to serve, and every person who stayed helped ensure its work would continue after my term. After serving as president, I became vice president and treasurer. The chapter had inherited more than $1,000 in debt from the pandemic, and I worked to repay it through fundraising, negotiation, and careful bookkeeping. It was quiet, unglamorous work, but it mattered to the students who would inherit the chapter. During that period, I also organized a stem-cell donor drive with the Gift of Life Marrow Registry. The drive required more than choosing a date: I corresponded with Gift of Life, selected strategic collection points, and delegated tasks to fraternity members. Having rebuilt the chapter, I now had a team that could carry out a project larger than any one of us, and we collected dozens of donations. Later, we learned that one participant had been confirmed as a lifesaving match for a 50-year-old man with myelodysplastic leukemia. I consider this our chapter's crowning achievement, because it gave concrete meaning to our work: a man was given a second chance against cancer because our chapter had made it easier for students to step forward. This arc, from five struggling members to a man's life saved, changed how I understand selflessness and philanthropy alike. The most consequential part of service may happen long before anyone sees its result: welcoming a new member, managing finances responsibly, or finding the right street corner to set up a donor drive. I learned to lead by creating conditions in which other people could help, then following through on the details that made their help possible. That is the kind of servant leadership I hope to continue, as I return to the Georgia Tech community to pursue a PhD. Michael Rudometkin is remembered for making time for people in need. Phi Sigma Pi taught me how much that time can accomplish when people commit it together. With the help of his scholarship, I intend to honor his memory by redoubling my commitment to excellence, servant leadership, and altruism as I begin my PhD.

The magnetic dartboard in my freshman dorm was the last thing I expected to draw inspiration from when I began my final semester as an undergraduate. But when Dr. David Flaherty challenged me to design and build a robot for applying a consistent catalyst coating to an electrode, I found myself thinking about it again. Coating electrodes with a catalyst by hand takes months of practice and is highly prone to inconsistency, but Dr. Flaherty had hired me to make this all-important step more repeatable without sacrificing the flexibility our experiments required. Consistency matters because the coating on an electrode can influence its behavior: if the preparation varies, it becomes harder to tell whether a change in performance comes from the catalyst or from the way the sample was made. A dependable automated spray-coater would give the lab a more reliable starting point for researching eco-friendly, next-generation electrocatalytic processes—as long as motion patterns, electrode mounts, and aerosol shields all worked together precisely and efficiently. So, I began casting about for creative solutions, and landed on two interesting but unlikely domains. For the moving stage, I drew inspiration from aerial photography, a hobby of mine. Years of adjusting drone gimbals and flight paths by hand had given me a physical intuition for spatial motion and coordinate systems, and I drew on that experience to develop the spray device's control sequences. The dartboard answered a different part of the problem: I adapted its simple magnetic mounting principle to design and build interchangeable electrode holders and aerosol shields. Instead of rebuilding the setup each time an experiment required a different configuration, the user could swap those parts in seconds. By the end of that semester, I had built a fully functional robot that automated in-situ catalyst spray coating, and saved Dr. Flaherty's lab an estimated $70,000. Neither the drone nor the dartboard could tell me whether the system would be consistent. However, when I tested coated electrodes using membrane-electrode assemblies, potentiostats, and gas chromatography, the results demonstrated the system was seven times more consistent than a human. That November, I presented the work at the 2025 AIChE Annual National Student Conference in Boston, where my poster received third prize in catalysis. This experience taught me the importance of putting an unlikely idea through the demands of an actual experiment. The drone and dartboard helped me get past a difficult starting point, while careful measurement told me whether the result deserved to be used. That balance between creative instinct and empirical evidence is what I want to bring to my doctoral work. When I see a better way to do something, I want to build it carefully enough that someone else can rely on it too. For a video of a test-run of my invention, using a blue tracer dye instead of a catalyst suspension, please visit: https://youtu.be/zddfDDMpafM

The honest answer is that calculus is the language dynamic systems speak, and nearly everything in science and engineering is a dynamic system. I say this as a chemical engineer, where the pattern is impossible to miss. Almost any system we care about—a reactor heating up, a battery discharging, a drug diffusing through tissue—can be described by one or more differential equations, statements about how quantities change from moment to moment. That is calculus's real gift to STEM. Algebra describes the world standing still. Calculus describes the world in motion, and the world refuses to stand still. I have watched this play out in my own hands. As an undergraduate researcher, I helped build an electrochemical cell that converts captured carbon dioxide into useful chemicals, and the reaction's behavior at the copper surface came down to rates: how fast charge transfers, how fast ions diffuse, how the two compete. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, I spent a summer writing MATLAB scripts to model compressed-air energy storage, and the entire model was a set of differential equations describing heat flowing in and out of a column of liquid. The code was new. The mathematics underneath was three centuries old. What convinces me of calculus's importance, though, isn't that it appears everywhere. It's that specific revolutionary technologies simply don't exist without it. GPS satellites correct their clocks using equations from relativity, which is differential geometry—calculus grown up. Medical imaging reconstructs the inside of your body by integrating X-ray measurements from a thousand angles. Every controlled flight, from a Cessna to the rockets I build and launch as a hobby, stays stable because someone solved the equations of motion faster than the vehicle could misbehave. My own flight simulations do the same thing on a laptop before I ever light a motor. And the most contemporary example is hiding in plain sight. The large language models behind modern AI learn through back-propagation, an algorithm that is, at its core, an enormous exercise in derivatives. Training a model means measuring how wrong it is, then computing the gradient — the multivariable derivative — of that error with respect to billions of internal parameters, and nudging each one downhill. The chain rule from freshman calculus, applied at industrial scale, is teaching machines to write and reason. When people ask whether calculus is still relevant, I point out that the most disruptive technology of this decade is a derivative calculation running in a data center. So calculus matters to STEM because change is what STEM studies, and calculus is the only mathematics built for change. It let us describe the world in motion, then predict it, then control it. Every field that has learned to do those three things has calculus somewhere near its foundation.

1. Last fall, I took a chemical product design course, which centered on a group project. My team developed an electrochemical energy storage system to improve power reliability in developing regions, where solar energy is common but inconsistent. Having spent the previous summer in a highly technical electrochemistry internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, I initially leaned into my usual strengths: ideation, optimization, and scientific rigor. As the project unfolded, though, I realized the problem I was solving, energy density, wasn’t the one that mattered. One of my teammates, a student from Kenya, described the situation his own community faced: hauling fuel and batteries miles on foot, unreliable power for refrigeration causing food spoilage, and even life-threatening failures in hospitals when solar panels lost power at night. His story entirely reframed the problem. The bottleneck wasn’t energy density at all, but cost, portability, and safe distribution. With his input, we designed a dry-shipped gel battery scheme that reduced transport cost, simplified production, and improved safety. I could never have found such a solution alone—in fact, if I hadn’t opened my mind to his perspective, I would have spent the entire semester solving a problem that effectively didn’t exist. This experience inspired me to pursue research that is technically rigorous, responsive to diverse needs, and accountable to the communities it hopes to serve. My classmate’s story ultimately inspired a central part of my research philosophy—ensuring each project benefits from as many diverse perspectives and lived experiences as possible. 2. Every year in metro Atlanta, roughly 700 people die of leukemias and lymphomas. There are no ribbons on lampposts for them, and most people I talk to have no idea the toll is that high. Fewer still know the strangest part: many of those deaths are preventable without a single new drug, with a transplant of blood stem cells from a genetically-matched stranger. Organizations such as Gift of Life keep registries of willing donors. The problem is that the registries are far too small, and the vast majority of patients who need a match never find one. Here is what I noticed that others walk past: the odds are worse for ethnic minorities, who are badly underrepresented in donor databases, and Atlanta is one of the most diverse cities in the country. Everyone treats that first fact as a tragedy, and it is. But put the two together, and the picture flips completely. A registry drive in Atlanta recruits exactly the donors the databases lack, which means a swab collected here carries more lifesaving potential than one collected almost anywhere else. Our city's demographics are not just a vulnerability—they are an asset nobody is using. As President of Georgia Tech’s chapter Phi Sigma Pi National Honor Fraternity, I tested this theory by spearheading a marrow registry drive with Gift of Life Marrow Registry, which signed up twenty donors. A year later, I was notified that one of our matches went on to save the life of a 50-year-old man with myelodysplastic leukemia. With real resources, I would run drives across the whole city — campuses, churches, festivals — and turn Atlanta into the registry's richest source of matches, saving lives far beyond it.