The first fundraiser I ever organized raised less money than a single textbook costs in the United States. I remember being disappointed by the number at the time, and I remember, more clearly now, what that small amount actually bought: a box of sustainable menstrual products that made it possible for a handful of girls in a rural Nepali community to keep attending school during a week they would have otherwise stayed home. That was the moment I understood that leadership through service is rarely about the size of what you raise. It is about whether you showed up consistently enough, and organized carefully enough, that the help actually reached someone. That fundraiser was part of Rato Organization, a nonprofit I co founded before I left Nepal for college, focused on menstrual hygiene education and access in rural schools and communities. My role was not just to volunteer my time, it was to build the structure other volunteers could step into. I helped plan the education sessions we brought into schools, coordinated the logistics of distributing products to families who could not otherwise afford them, and organized fundraisers from the ground up, figuring out who to ask, how to explain why the cause mattered, and how to make sure the money we raised turned into something tangible instead of disappearing into overhead. It was my first real experience with the unglamorous side of service, the spreadsheets and follow up emails and small negotiations that have to happen before anyone gets to see the visible, feel good part of giving back. I have carried that same instinct with me into every community I have joined since moving to the United States for college. As a Resident Assistant, I organize programming meant to support the academic and personal growth of the students living around me, work that only functions if someone is willing to plan it rather than simply hope it happens. As a tutor through my school's Educational Opportunity Program, I show up consistently for students in math and biology, because I learned early that service which shows up once is not the same as service someone can rely on. And through my role in student government, first as Chief of Staff and now as Coordinator of Student Advocacy, I chair a committee working on systemic issues like transportation access and housing, which has taught me that the most meaningful service often means sitting in long meetings and pushing slow bureaucracy forward, not just the visible moments people photograph. I believe leadership through service matters because service without leadership tends to stay small and scattered, and leadership without service tends to stay abstract and self serving. The two only become powerful together, when someone cares enough to organize the unglamorous middle part, so that other people's good intentions actually reach the people who need them. That is the lesson Rato Organization taught me first, in a rural Nepali classroom with a modest fundraising total and a box of products that mattered far more than the number attached to it, and it is the lesson I keep relearning, in different forms, in every community I am part of since.

There is a particular quiet in a lab at eleven at night, when the only sound is the low hum of the ECIS monitor and the occasional blip of a reading that means a cell culture is still, patiently, alive. I have spent a lot of hours in that quiet over the past year and a half, and it has become one of my favourite places to think. I mention it first because I think it says something true about how I approach almost everything I do, carefully, patiently, and with a real belief that small, exacting work adds up to something that matters. I am a rising senior at SUNY Cortland, dual majoring in Biomedical Sciences and Mathematics, and my academic path has been built on that same instinct toward patient, layered work. I have maintained President's List and Dean's List recognition across multiple semesters and was recognized in the top five percent of my class through Honors Convocation. I was invited into the Upsilon Epsilon Chapter of Beta Beta Beta, the biological honor society, and I have carried that same rigor into research from nearly the moment I arrived on campus. During the summer after my sophomore year, I developed and compared machine learning models to predict diabetes risk using national health survey data, evaluating them with ROC and AUC analysis, sensitivity and specificity testing, and formal statistical comparisons. That project became a first author publication in the International Journal of Statistics and Probability, and it also earned me a spot presenting a poster at the Cuba TIES International Scientific Convention in Cienfuegos, an experience that showed me research could travel, in every sense of that word, further than I expected it to. Since then, my research has only grown in scope. I currently contribute to an NIH SBIR funded project developing the Cell Assurance Monitor, a device designed to detect contamination and phenotypic shifts in cultured cells, where I perform sterile cell culture, prepare ECIS electrode arrays, and analyze impedance data using ANOVA and post hoc testing. Alongside that, I am completing a summer research project in human mobility and network science, where I have implemented published research methods, extended them to new datasets, and built a multilayer network model combining subway, taxi, and bike share data across an entire city. Both projects ask a version of the same question in different languages, biological and computational, how do we notice a system beginning to go wrong early enough to still change its outcome. I find that question endlessly interesting, and I intend to keep chasing it. None of this happened in isolation from the rest of my life on campus, and I do not think it should. I currently serve as Coordinator of Student Advocacy for our Student Government Association, after a year as Chief of Staff, representing student interests at the SUNY Student Assembly and on campus wide committees addressing transportation access and housing. I work as a Resident Assistant, building community and responding to the everyday needs of the students I live alongside, and I have tutored through our Educational Opportunity Program, teaching math and biology to students who remind me, often, of myself a few years earlier. This past summer I also worked as an orientation assistant, welcoming incoming students into a campus I still remember feeling brand new and overwhelming myself. My commitment to service extends beyond campus as well. Before I left Nepal for college, I co founded an organization that brings menstrual hygiene education and sustainable products to girls in rural communities, work I still care deeply about and stay connected to. I share all of this not because I think a list of accomplishments tells the full story of who I am, but because I think the pattern underneath it does. Every version of my involvement, in the lab, in student government, in a residence hall, in a rural classroom in Nepal, comes from the same place: a belief that careful attention, applied consistently and over time, changes outcomes for people. I have tried to build a college experience where that belief shows up everywhere, not just in the parts that look good on paper. I am asking to be considered for this scholarship because I am someone who takes both the substance and the responsibility of leadership seriously. Support like this would let me spend my final year fully invested in the research, mentorship, and service I have built my college experience around, rather than dividing that attention across the part time work that currently helps make my education possible. I do not think of that final year as an ending. I think of it as the year all of this patient, layered work finally has the room to become something larger, and I would be grateful for the chance to make the most of it.

My awkward thing is that I blow on my fingers if I accidentally touch my chin. I have no idea why. I did not learn this from anyone, nobody taught it to me, it just started at some point and now it is permanent, an instinct as automatic as blinking. My hand grazes my chin while I am talking or thinking or just existing, and before I have even registered it happened, I am already blowing air onto my fingertips like I touched something hot. My friends have caught on. Now they will just say "chin" when they see it happen, and I do the little finger blow on cue, and everyone laughs, including me, because I genuinely cannot explain it either. I have tried to figure out where it came from. I have no memory of starting it. It is not a superstition I was raised with, it is not tied to anything I can point to, it is just a wire that got crossed somewhere in my head and stayed crossed. I like that about it, honestly. Most of my habits have an explanation. This one does not, and there is something almost restful about having one weird thing about yourself that you are not required to justify. The other thing people notice is that I have started saying "frustu" instead of frustrated, which is not a word in any language, it is just what happens when you take an English word and run it through a Nepali accent enough times that it turns into its own thing. I did not decide to start saying it. It just came out one day, mid rant about something small, and it stuck, because it somehow captures the feeling better than the real word does. Frustrated sounds formal. Frustu sounds like exactly what it is, a small, specific, slightly ridiculous kind of annoyed, the kind you complain about and then immediately laugh at yourself for. I think both of these things say the same thing about me, that I am not particularly interested in smoothing myself out to seem more normal. I have a habit with no origin story and a made up word that only works because it was born out of two languages colliding in my head. Neither one is impressive or meaningful in any grand sense. They are just mine, the small strange residue of being a specific person instead of a generic one. Charles apparently kept trying to shoot basketball right handed even though swimming was clearly where his talent lived. I think there is something to that, letting yourself be a little uncoordinated in one direction so you can be fully, unmistakably yourself in another. I am not graceful about my chin thing. I have made peace with that. I would rather be memorable and slightly odd than seamless and forgettable, and honestly, the finger blowing gets a laugh every time, which counts for something.

I learned to code the way I learned most things that mattered to me, out of necessity, sitting with a problem until it finally gave something back. It started with a spreadsheet of national health data and a question I could not let go of: could a machine learn to predict who was at risk for diabetes earlier than a doctor might catch it. I taught myself enough Python and statistical modeling to find out, comparing models against each other, testing them with ROC curves and chi square tests, until the numbers finally told a clear story. That project became a published paper before I turned 21, but what stayed with me was not the publication. It was the feeling of teaching myself a language, code, and discovering it could ask questions I actually cared about. I am a rising senior at SUNY Cortland studying Biomedical Sciences and Mathematics, and education has shaped nearly every version of myself I have built since arriving in the United States from Nepal. I currently work on a research project studying how human mobility, the ordinary movement of subways, taxis, and bike shares through a city, shapes the spread of infectious disease. The work is heavily computational. I build network models, apply dimensionality reduction techniques, and spend long hours in code trying to make a massive tangle of transit data say something true. Every time a model finally clicks into place, I feel the same thing I felt with that first diabetes project: the specific joy of a hard problem finally opening up. That joy is part of why I tutor. I work with students in math and biology through my school's Educational Opportunity Program, and I have watched the same thing happen for them that once happened for me, a concept resisting understanding for weeks, then suddenly unlocking. I believe access to that unlocking should never depend on someone's financial situation or their starting point, which is also why, before I ever left Nepal, I co founded an organization bringing menstrual hygiene education to girls in rural communities, because dignity and opportunity should not be rationed by geography. My goal is to keep building at the intersection of computation and human wellbeing, whether that means graduate study in computational biology or a career developing the kind of data driven tools that catch problems, medical or societal, early enough to still change their outcome. I want my code to keep doing what it did the first time I wrote it: ask a better question than I could ask on my own. This scholarship would help me spend my final year of college leaning fully into that work, research, mentorship, and the kind of self taught technical growth that has carried me this far, rather than splitting my energy across the part time jobs that currently make my education possible. The scholarship recognizes that circumstance should never be the limit on what a person can learn. I want the chance to keep proving that true, in Dr. Gentles' name and in my own.

The first snow I ever saw fall in Cortland did not feel like the snow in movies. It felt like a foreign language, cold and unfamiliar, landing on a body that had spent eighteen years learning the rhythms of Kathmandu instead. I remember standing outside my dorm that first winter, watching my breath turn visible in front of me, and thinking that I had traded almost everything I knew how to read, the weather, the food, the way people spoke to each other, for a degree I was determined to earn. Moving from Nepal to the United States for college was not one decision. It was hundreds of small ones, made over and over, in classrooms where I had to learn a new academic culture along with new material, in dining halls where I quietly figured out what to eat when nothing tasted like home, in advising offices where I explained my visa status so many times that the explanation stopped feeling like mine. Nobody warns you that homesickness is not a single wave. It is a tide, and it comes back on ordinary Tuesdays for no reason at all. What carried me through was not toughness so much as attention to the people around me. I started tutoring younger students in math and biology, partly because I needed the income and partly because I remembered exactly what it felt like to not understand something and be too proud to ask. I joined student government, first as chief of staff and now as coordinator of student advocacy, because I had learned firsthand what it means to feel like a system was not built with you in mind, and I would rather help fix it than just survive inside it. And back home, before I ever left for college, I co founded an organization that brings menstrual hygiene education and supplies to girls in rural Nepal, because dignity should not depend on geography. That instinct, to notice a gap and try to close it, followed me into my academic work too. In our cell culture lab, I contribute towards developing a device meant to catch signs of trouble before they become a problem. Such projects are really about the same thing that pulled me across an ocean in the first place: paying close enough attention to notice what is going wrong, early enough to still do something about it. I am proud of the distance I have traveled, literally and otherwise, and I do not think that distance is finished yet. This scholarship would let me spend my last year of college focused on the research, mentorship, and service that brought me here, rather than splitting my attention across the multiple part time jobs that currently make my education possible. I crossed an ocean to build a life out of unfamiliar pieces. I intend to spend the rest of my education proving it was worth it.

Prompt 1: My favourite book There is a scene in Atul Gawande's Being Mortal where he describes his father, also a physician, coming to understand his own body as a patient rather than a doctor, and something about that reversal has never left me. I read the book during a semester when I was spending most of my free hours in a cell culture lab, learning to keep living things alive under careful conditions, and it cracked open a question I did not know I was avoiding. What happens when the body cannot be kept alive, no matter how carefully we tend it. What do we owe people in that last stretch of life, when the goal quietly shifts from curing to accompanying. Gawande writes as both a surgeon and a son, and that double vision is what makes the book impossible to shake. He is honest about how much of modern medicine treats dying as a problem to be solved rather than a passage to be witnessed, and he tells that story through people, not statistics. I remember reading his account of an elderly woman who simply wanted to keep her balcony and her independence, and realizing I had never once considered that a good doctor might have to ask what someone is living for before asking what might kill them. That question followed me back into my own research. I study infectious disease and human mobility, work that is often reduced to numbers, models, and curves on a graph. Gawande reminded me that every one of those numbers is a person who wanted something specific from their remaining time, whether that was a balcony, a grandchild's wedding, or one more ordinary Tuesday. I think about that every time I sit with a dataset now. Behind the resistance readings and the mobility patterns is always somebody's life, and I owe it the same attention Gawande gives his patients on the page. Prompt 2: A cool scientific fact Your cells are, in a very real sense, better at biology than most of your best equipment. The electrical monitor I use in lab can detect when a culture of cells is under stress because the cells themselves change how tightly they pack together, closing their gaps like a crowd bracing for something. They do this without instruction, without a brain, purely because it is written into how living tissue protects itself. I find it strange and a little moving that something as small as a single layer of cells already knows how to defend itself long before we ever learn to read the signal.

There is a particular sound a healthy cell culture makes, if you can call it a sound. It is not audible. It is a line on a screen, a small trembling wave of electrical resistance that rises and falls as cells breathe and divide and occasionally, quietly, begin to fail. The first time I sat with our ECIS monitor and watched that line spike, I felt something click into place. Biology was not just what happened under a microscope. It was information, and if you built the right instrument, you could listen to it happening in real time. I am a rising senior at SUNY Cortland studying Biomedical Sciences and Mathematics, and for the past year and a half I have worked on an NIH SBIR funded project developing the Cell Assurance Monitor, a device meant to catch contamination and unexpected shifts in cultured cells before they ruin an experiment or, further down the line, a treatment. My days in that lab are made of small, exacting rituals: sterile technique, prepared electrode arrays, hours of statistical testing to figure out whether a change in the data means something or nothing at all. It is patient work. But it taught me that biotechnology rewards a very particular kind of person, someone willing to be careful and curious in the same breath. That same curiosity keeps showing up in different forms. I have built machine learning models to predict diabetes risk using national health data, and I currently study how human movement, the ordinary rhythm of buses and subways and bike shares, shapes the way infectious disease travels through a city. On the surface these projects look unrelated to my cell culture work. Underneath, they are asking the same question. How do we read a living system closely enough to catch trouble early, whether that system is a petri dish or a population of eight million people. I want to spend my career living inside that question. After graduation I hope to pursue graduate study in biomedical engineering or computational biology, and eventually work on diagnostic technologies that do what our lab's monitor does: notice the moment something starts to go wrong, quietly, before it becomes an emergency. I am especially drawn to the parts of biotech where invention meets urgency, where a good idea in a lab can turn into something that protects real people. This scholarship would let me keep showing up fully for that work. Between coursework, research, and the part time jobs that keep me afloat, funding like this buys back something valuable: time and attention I can pour back into the lab instead of spending it worrying about tuition. I would be honored to carry it forward in James Iademarco's name, as someone trying, in my own small corner of biotechnology, to build things that listen closely and help early.