I am a PhD candidate in Biological Chemistry at the University of California Irvine, and I am asking for support that would allow me to continue research I believe genuinely matters. I will let my record speak for itself, and then explain what I am working toward. I completed my Bachelor of Science in Biology at Nevada State University in 2022, graduating Summa Cum Laude with a 4.0 GPA and Honors. I was awarded the Cox Communication Scholarship, the NSF EPSCoR Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program grant, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program Award, the American Chemical Society 2021 Outstanding Chemistry Student Award, and the MARCOS Scholarship for my undergraduate work. My senior thesis on CRISPR-Cas9 gene knockout in Bacillus cereus was defended publicly and earned Honors distinction. Before finishing my undergraduate degree, I was accepted to the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Pediatric Oncology Education Program, a nationally competitive program, though it was ultimately cancelled due to COVID-19. I was also awarded the Nevada NASA Space Grant during my undergraduate years. I entered UC Irvine's Cellular and Molecular Biology PhD program in 2022. Since then, I have been awarded the F31 National Research Service Award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, one of the most competitive individual predoctoral fellowships offered by the NIH. My award number is F31HL176174, and the fellowship runs through 2027. I was also supported by an R01 Supplemental Grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases during my first two years. In December 2024, I received the ASH Abstract Achievement Award at the 66th American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting and Exposition, one of the largest hematology conferences in the world. In October 2025, I was invited as a Guest Speaker to the INBRE 13th Annual STEM Research Symposium at Nevada State University, where I delivered a talk on my doctoral research. In April 2026, I presented at the European School of Haematology 11th Translational Research Conference. My research focuses on the JAK/STAT signaling pathway in myeloproliferative neoplasms, a class of blood cancers. Specifically, I am investigating how the JAK2V617F mutation drives non-canonical cytokine signaling that exhausts normal hematopoietic stem cells and promotes malignancy. I have six publications, including a first-author manuscript currently in review at Blood Advances and a co-first-author paper in Haematologica. I am also a co-author on manuscripts in review at Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Cell. Outside of my own research, I have been deeply committed to training the next generation of scientists. I mentored Madison Fitzsimmons through the UCI CURE Cancer summer program; she subsequently joined our lab full time and was admitted as a direct PhD student. I mentored Eshika Arora, an undergraduate who is now enrolled at UCSF medical school. I mentored Aanya Amin through the CRI Youth Summer Fellowship Program, who enrolled at UCI and joined our lab as a freshman. I also mentored Lauren Chen, a high school student who returned the following year as a volunteer, and Izzy Sigel, whom I first mentored as a high school student and later as an undergraduate. Mentorship is not something I do alongside my research. I consider it part of the work. I grew up in a low-income, single-parent household. My father, a cultural anthropologist and university professor, died of Ewing Sarcoma when I was ten years old. My mother raised me on her own for the decade that followed. I have attended schools on multiple continents, hold an IGCSE from Singapore, completed a year abroad in the Netherlands, and built a research career in the American university system from a starting point that offered no guarantees. I am applying for this scholarship because doctoral stipends in California do not stretch far, particularly with a child on the way. The work I am doing has real potential to contribute to the understanding and treatment of blood cancers. I have earned support at every level I have competed for it, and I am asking for support here as well. I hold a 3.84 GPA in my doctoral program and have maintained the academic standards required to hold a federally funded NIH fellowship. I am committed to completing my PhD, publishing work that advances our understanding of blood cancer biology, and building a laboratory where the next generation of scientists can do the same. I am grateful for the consideration of the Christian Fitness Association, and I would be honored to receive this scholarship, and to do justice to the opportunity I have been given to pursue this work.

My father died when I was ten years old. He had been sick for three years, and my mother had already begun carrying the household on her own before he was gone. After he passed, she continued to do so for the next decade, raising me as a single parent on an income that left little room for error. That experience shaped how I understand persistence. There were no safety nets. There was my mother, working, and the expectation that her sacrifice would mean something. I took that seriously. I graduated from Nevada State University with a 4.0 GPA and was accepted to a PhD program in Biological Chemistry at UC Irvine, where I now study the molecular mechanisms driving blood cancers. My research focuses on the JAK/STAT signaling pathway in myeloproliferative neoplasms, and my long-term goal is to run my own laboratory and train the next generation of scientists. I have already started the latter. I have mentored five students through programs including the UCI CURE Cancer summer program and the CRI Youth Summer Fellowship, several of whom have gone on to PhD programs and medical school. I grew up understanding what it means to need someone to believe in you and show up. That is what I try to be for the students I mentor. The financial pressure has not disappeared. Graduate stipends in one of the most expensive states in the country leave little margin, particularly with a baby on the way. This scholarship would make a direct difference. My mother taught me to keep going regardless. I intend to.

I never had a single moment when I decided I wanted to be a teacher. I had an entire childhood of them. Both of my parents are academics. My father was a cultural anthropologist, an Associate Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia who spent years doing fieldwork in Borneo, studying the Iban people, and writing about how communities endure. My mother built her own career in the university world. I grew up not just around education but inside it. Dinner conversations were seminars. The rhythms of a semester were as natural as the seasons. Faculty offices, university libraries, departmental colloquia: these were the landscapes of my childhood. My father died when I was ten years old, after a three-year battle with Ewing Sarcoma. I watched him fight. I watched him lose. And somewhere in the years that followed, I came to understand something he had modeled without ever naming it: that teaching is not a job. It is a commitment to keeping knowledge alive and passing it to the next person in line. I am now a PhD candidate in Biological Chemistry at UC Irvine, studying the molecular mechanisms that drive blood cancers. My long-term goal is to run my own research laboratory at a university, and I want to be honest about what that means to me. It means science, yes. But it also means teaching. Every PI I have admired, including my own advisor, Dr. Angela Fleischman, is first and foremost a teacher. The lab is a classroom. The students are the curriculum. I have already started. Through the UCI CURE Cancer summer program, I mentored Madison Fitzsimmons, an undergraduate who went on to join our lab full time and was admitted to a direct PhD program. I mentored Eshika Arora, who graduated and enrolled at UCSF medical school. Through the CRI Youth Summer Fellowship Program, I mentored Aanya Amin, who later joined UCI as a freshman and entered our lab. I also mentored Lauren Chen, a high school student through the same program who returned the following summer as a volunteer, and Izzy Sigel, whom I first mentored as a high school student and then continued mentoring when she came to UCI as an undergraduate. Each of those relationships taught me something I could not have learned any other way. Teaching is not about transmission. It is about the moment when a student stops waiting for the answer and starts trusting their own question. Every time I have watched that happen, I have understood more clearly what my parents were doing all those years at the front of the room. What inspired me to become a teacher was not a single person, though my father is never far from any answer I give. It was the accumulation of being raised in a world where learning was treated as the most serious and worthwhile thing a person could do. It was watching academics give their lives, fully and deliberately, to that work. It was understanding, finally, that the version of science I want to practice is inseparable from the version of teaching I want to do. Dr. Reece's story resonates with me deeply. She went wherever there was an educational need. She taught in prisons, in inner-city schools, wherever students needed someone willing to show up. I grew up watching my father do something similar: traveling to remote regions of Borneo because the knowledge there mattered and someone needed to treat it that way. The commitment is the same. You go where the work is. You show up. You give what you have. I am a low-income graduate student. The financial burden of doctoral training is real. But I apply for this scholarship not only because of the financial need, though that is genuine. I apply because Dr. Reece's legacy is one I recognize. It is the same legacy I am trying to build: a life spent learning alongside others, and refusing to stop.

My awkward thing is that I grew up everywhere and belong nowhere in particular, and I have turned that into something. I was born to an anthropologist father who spent his career studying the Iban people of Borneo, and an academic mother who shared the same commitment to a life of the mind. That meant my childhood happened in pieces, across countries. I attended primary school in Singapore, spent a year on exchange in the Netherlands, and eventually landed in Henderson, Nevada, where I did my undergraduate degree at Nevada State University. I hold a U.S. High School Equivalency from a British-curriculum school in Singapore. My CV, if you read it quickly, looks like the work of several different people. What is different about me is that I absorbed all of those contexts without fully belonging to any of them. I was always the kid who was a little out of place, which meant I got very good at watching, at noticing how people work, at figuring out what the actual rules of a place were as distinct from what everyone assumed they were. My father was a cultural anthropologist. That skill, paying close attention to systems and the people inside them, was what he did for a living. I think I inherited it. I carried that quality into science. I am now a PhD candidate in Biological Chemistry at UC Irvine, studying the molecular mechanisms that drive blood cancers. The JAK/STAT signaling pathway I work on is, in some ways, a system like any other. It has its own logic, its own assumptions, its own rules that operate differently from how the textbooks describe them when a cancer-driving mutation like JAK2V617F is present. My job is to figure out what the pathway is actually doing, as distinct from what the literature has assumed it does. I think I am reasonably good at that, in part because of where I came from. The other thing that makes me a little different is that I have been writing code since before I knew what a programmer was. My father loved computers. I grew up watching him use them. At some point in college, when the bioinformatics tools available to me were not quite doing what I needed, I started building my own. I have several computational tools published on GitHub, including pipelines for bulk RNA sequencing and ATAC sequencing analysis, and a multi-omics integration tool for regulatory network analysis. None of that was in the plan. It just turned out to be necessary. I think the honest answer to "what makes you stand out" is that I have never quite fit the profile of whatever context I was in, and I learned to make that useful rather than awkward. The trajectory from a British school in Singapore to a PhD in cancer biology at a UC research hospital is not a straight line. It is more like a path that someone kept adjusting as new terrain appeared. I am still adjusting.

I love math because it is the only language that does not lie. That sounds like an exaggeration, but I mean it precisely. When I am reading scientific literature in my field, cancer biology, I have to work hard to assess claims. Is this model well-controlled? Is this interpretation of the data reasonable? The language of biology, even careful biology, is full of hedges and interpretive layers. Mathematics is different. A proof is either valid or it is not. A differential equation either describes the behavior of a system or it does not. That clarity is something I have never stopped finding beautiful. I am a PhD candidate in Biological Chemistry at UC Irvine, working on myeloproliferative neoplasms, a class of blood cancers. The signaling pathway I study is fundamentally a mathematical object. Kinases phosphorylate substrates with kinetics that can be described by differential equations. Gene expression responds to signals in ways that can be modeled and predicted. When the math works, when data fits a model and the model makes a prediction that turns out to be correct, the feeling is exactly what mathematicians describe: a kind of satisfying rightness I cannot get from any other mode of thinking. I did not come to this love easily. In high school, math felt like procedures to memorize. It was not until I encountered calculus that something shifted. The idea of a limit, of approaching a value without ever quite reaching it, made me pay attention in a new way. I started to see mathematics as a way of making the invisible visible. What I love most is what math reveals about complexity. The systems I study involve thousands of proteins interacting across multiple timescales inside a single cell. The only way to reason carefully about that complexity is mathematically. Linear models, differential equations, statistical frameworks, these are the difference between being overwhelmed by complexity and understanding it. I love math because it is the closest thing I know to a reliable way of understanding the world. And in a field where the world you are trying to understand is the one that killed your father, reliability matters.

Calculus is not a subject I studied in isolation. I study it in context, and the context is cancer. As a PhD candidate in Biological Chemistry at UC Irvine, I work on a class of blood cancers called myeloproliferative neoplasms. At the molecular level, what drives these cancers is a dysregulation in signaling, specifically in the JAK/STAT pathway, where a single mutation causes a kinase to become constitutively active. Understanding what that means, modeling how a signaling cascade amplifies over time, predicting when a normal hematopoietic stem cell becomes exhausted and malignant, all of it requires calculus. Not metaphorically. Literally. The differential equations that describe how a signal propagates through a cell, how gene expression responds to a perturbation, how a population of stem cells changes its composition over time under selective pressure: these are the mathematical tools of modern cancer biology. Without calculus, the quantitative models that underpin our understanding of tumor dynamics are simply inaccessible. We cannot reason carefully about rates of change, about what happens at the limit, about how small perturbations compound over time into irreversible biological transitions, without the conceptual framework that calculus provides. But I think the importance of calculus extends beyond its direct applications. Calculus is a training in a particular kind of thinking. It teaches students to reason about processes, not just states. In most of pre-calculus mathematics, the question is "what is the value?" In calculus, the question becomes "how is it changing, and what happens next?" That shift is not trivial. It is the shift from static description to dynamic understanding, and it maps directly onto what it means to do science. Every STEM field I can think of has a calculus-shaped hole at its center. Physics without calculus cannot describe motion or force in any useful way. Chemistry without calculus cannot model reaction kinetics. Biology without calculus cannot quantitatively describe growth, decay, population dynamics, or physiological processes. Engineering without calculus cannot optimize structures, circuits, or fluid systems. Even fields like economics and public health, which overlap substantially with STEM methodology, depend on differential equations to model the systems they study. There is also a pedagogical argument. Students who work through calculus develop a tolerance for abstraction and a comfort with reasoning about things that are not directly observable. These are exactly the skills a scientist needs. The patience required to understand why a limit works, or what it means for a function to be continuous, is the same patience required to read a dense primary literature paper or to design a careful experiment. I came to calculus the way many STEM students do, as a requirement I worked through without fully appreciating it. I now understand it as the language in which some of the most important questions in science are written. Learning that language well enough to use it is not optional for anyone who wants to do serious work in a STEM field. It is foundational.

What I want to build is a research laboratory. Not the physical space, though that matters too. What I mean is the thing a lab actually is: a sustained intellectual community where the next generation of scientists can learn to ask questions that matter, fail productively, and develop the intuition that separates a technician from a scientist. That is what I am working toward, and everything I am doing right now is part of building it. I am currently a PhD candidate in Biological Chemistry at UC Irvine, working in the Fleischman Lab on the JAK/STAT signaling pathway in myeloproliferative neoplasms, a class of blood cancers. My research focuses on how cancer-driving mutations like JAK2V617F co-opt cytokine signaling to exhaust normal hematopoietic stem cells, and how we might interrupt that process. The scientific goal is to understand the molecular logic of malignancy well enough to identify new therapeutic targets. The longer goal is to carry this work into my own independent lab at a research university. I grew up in that world. Both of my parents are academics, and I spent my childhood in the rhythms of a university life, where learning was not something that ended at the school bell. Pursuing a PhD felt, to me, like going into the family business. But it also felt like the only place where I could do the work that actually matters to me. The community impact of what I am building is not abstract. Blood cancers affect hundreds of thousands of people every year. The better we understand the biology, the more specific and less toxic the treatments we can develop. Each paper, each dataset, each student I train is a brick in a structure that eventually translates into better outcomes for patients. I have already started the mentorship piece. I have trained undergraduates and high school students through programs like the UCI CURE Cancer program and the CRI Youth Summer Fellowship. Several of them have gone on to PhD programs and medical school. That part of the work, passing knowledge forward, feels as important to me as the research itself. What I want to build is a place where ambitious young scientists find their footing, and from which work emerges that genuinely helps people. I am aiming higher.

I was ten years old when I watched my father die in front of me. His name was Reed Wadley. He was a cultural anthropologist, an Associate Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and a man who had devoted his life to understanding how people survive, adapt, and build meaning in the world. He spent years studying the Iban people of Borneo, living in the field, learning their language, and writing about how communities endure at the margins of great powers. He was, in the truest sense, someone who dedicated himself to human life in all its complexity. And then, when I was seven years old, he was diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma. I did not fully understand what was happening at the time. I understood enough, in the way children understand things they have not been given the words for. I understood that something had changed in our house. I understood fear. Over the next three years, I watched my father fight. I watched him endure things no person should have to endure. Two memories in particular have stayed with me, resistant to the protective forgetting that has blurred so much else: seeing my father in the ICU with three tubes down his throat, held in a drug-induced coma, a body that barely resembled the man I knew, and then, a year later, watching him pass in front of me. I was ten years old. What cancer took from my family that day was enormous and specific. It took a scholar, a teacher, a father, a person with decades of unwritten work still ahead of him. It also took something harder to name: the version of my future that had included him in it. For a long time, I did not connect my grief to my science. It took years before I recognized that the same boy who had stood in that hospital room had grown into a graduate researcher studying cancer biology, specifically the molecular mechanisms that drive malignant blood diseases. I work now in the Fleischman Lab at UC Irvine, studying the JAK/STAT signaling pathway in myeloproliferative neoplasms, trying to understand how normal hematopoietic stem cells become exhausted and how cancers like the one that killed my father gain their foothold. I cannot say with certainty that losing him is what drove me here. But I also cannot say it did not. What I have learned through this experience is not a lesson with clean edges. It is more like a permanent orientation. I know, at a level below argument, that cancer is not an abstraction. It is specific. It takes specific people, from specific families, at specific moments when those people are irreplaceable. Every patient I read about in a clinical paper was someone's father. That knowledge does not make the science harder. It makes it feel necessary. Sharra Rainbolt, from what this scholarship describes, understood that necessity too. I am honored to apply in her memory.