Alessandra Ferzoco began identifying as a scientist when she started in a program in high school that allowed her to join a molecular biology research lab at nearby University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). From there, she embarked on a “career built around labs.”

Ferzoco chose to attend UCSB as an undergraduate to continue her work in the molecular biology lab, and being accepted into the College of Creative Studies allowed her to fast-track her studies. The College allowed students to design their own majors, bypass some of the prerequisites to get to more advanced content more quickly, and work on their own independent research.

“I switched into a physical chemistry lab, which was a completely foreign environment—everything was stainless steel,” says Ferzoco. “The lab was using devices to try to understand the fundamental physics of why biological molecules adopt the shapes they do.”

Ferzoco became particularly interested in the different shapes DNA helices can fold into, which could lead to better understanding of what they can do in the body. During this time, she became interested in the devices facilitating her work.

“Everything I was studying was in a vacuum and uninterrupted by their usual contexts,” says Ferzoco. “I liked the scale of the problem—I was examining only the physics of DNA folding.”

After earning her B.S. in Chemistry from UCSB, Ferzoco considered applying to medical school, but she changed her mind too late to apply to other graduate programs. She took the opportunity and moved to East Coast, where she worked as a research assistant in a lab in the physical chemistry department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

After a year, she joined the Ph.D. in Chemistry program at Chapel Hill, spending the first several years working on building devices that would bring more detailed understandings about the fundamentals of chemical reactions.

After earning her Ph.D., Ferzoco was awarded a five-year Rowland Fellowship at Harvard, where she built devices to generate and trap ions and ion-molecule complexes and then measure their reactions using mass spectrometry and laser spectroscopy.

“Photosynthesis is useful but complicated, and humans can’t rebuild the millions of constituents that cells use to complete the process,” says Ferzoco. “However, smaller molecules also use sunlight, and no one understood how, so we sought to learn more about them and electron transfer mechanisms.”

Major: Engineering with a concentration in computing

One thing I enjoy about Olin is just how dedicated all of the students are to teaching each other. The amount of learning and knowledge I picked up from other undergrads has been pretty incredible. I've done my best in the last year and a half to give some of that back. I hope successfully.

Outside of class, one main things I do on campus is participate in the Formula SAE Team. Formula is one of the bigger project teams at Olin, and our goal as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers is building an electric race car.

But we have our own set of priorities and routine in addition to the competition. Those include trying to teach new members to do all sorts of things. I joined my first year and really enjoyed it. I became part of the leadership team as a sophomore, which is relatively common.

If I talked about Formula for an hour, I would spend most of the time just talking about how we teach people and what the engineering education benefits are. And then I would talk about the car ­– which is super fun, like a go-kart on steroids. It’s a blast to drive. I love it.

The competition we're participating in really tosses engineers into the event in a way that even Olin's very project-based learning curriculum doesn't quite do. For example, I am a software engineer. I didn't know any electrical engineering before coming to Olin. A lot of what I know I’ve learned through Formula. Two people who were the core of the team's leadership when I joined were hugely influential in my learning. They taught me a lot about electric vehicles, which is ultimately the career path that I ended up on. I interned at Tesla in the past and I'm going back this summer.

In high school, my interests were mostly theoretical. I knew I was good at math and science, but didn't have a whole lot of particularly targeted, applied interests. At the end of the day, the biggest thing I've gotten out of the hands-on learning at Olin is becoming more comfortable with solving unstructured problems.

Amy Phung's engineering imagination came to life the moment she saw a Mars rover model during a 4th-grade class trip to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “I thought to myself: I want to work on that…. And when I realized that engineers make things, I decided to be an engineer.”

Amy looked for an engineering school that provided a hands-on approach to learning combined with a strong community feeling, and after experiencing Candidates’ Weekend, she knew that Olin was the right place for her.

At Olin, Amy became a co-creator of her educational experience combining her robotics coursework with a SEA (Sea Education Association) semester program during which she sailed the waters of New Zealand and studied the ocean. “Because of Olin’s flexibility and the trust they placed in me, I was able to self-design my coursework, which put my robotics study in a bigger context and allowed me to discover deepwater robotics.”

After graduating from Olin, Amy will be attending MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to pursue higher degrees related to deepwater robotic software engineering. Recognizing her achievements at Olin, the National Science Foundation (NSF) honored Amy with its prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program award that will provide support during her graduate studies.

Faculty mentors make a big difference for students at Olin. Professor Dave Barret asked her to join the team working on robotic tractors, which changed Amy’s focus from self-driving cars to robotics. “I am thankful to Professor Barrett for encouraging me to learn more about robotic software design, helping me understand more about the robotics industry, and working with me to envision what my post-Olin career would look like.”   

Amy’s experience at Olin, and her relationships with faculty and peers, provided her with the knowledge and skills related to robotics and the encouragement to improve the world in her own way. “Olin brings the skillset you learn into a larger context of how to be impactful in the world…it’s built into the coursework,” says Amy, who wants to contribute to the study of climate change through her contributions to deep-sea robotics. “The faculty constantly push you to think about how you can solve big problems through engineering, and my peers helped me realize that I can really make an impact.”

I originally thought I was going to be a musician. It probably wasn’t until about my junior or senior year that I made the whole switch to say let’s try engineering. Then I came to Olin and decided on engineering with computing, which was definitely the last thing I thought I’d been doing.

I’m from a little town about an hour northwest of San Antonio. I started playing instruments when I was about eight. At one point I was probably in five or six different groups.

Engineering hadn’t been much of an interest until there was a project in my AP Environmental Science class where we had to build a little model that produced energy in some form, like from a turbine or solar. I feel like that was the first instance where I was tinkering with electronics and hardware and thought it was cool.

Olin initially wasn't at the top of my list because a lot of other colleges offer full-on music programs and I thought I’d try to do a double major. When I came for candidates’ weekend, that was when I was like, ‘If I get in, this is the place.’ I've been used to summer camps where you know everybody, even if you're not always around them. I had that same feeling here that everybody knows everybody. I felt I fit in here.

I’m director of student activities right now. So, I've been planning and running a lot of events. In a normal year, we’d run a formal in the spring and have things like video game tournaments. We did a carnival event with an inflatable obstacle course and a sticky note mural contest, which we felt was very Oliny. Olin really loves their sticky notes. There's just so much going on, which I find a lot of fun.

On March 11, 2016 I sat in MH 212 with the admission committee and much of the admission and financial aid staff selecting Candidates we would admit to the Olin Class of 2020. This was my first class as Dean. This was a very big deal. The Candidates were outstanding, as I have since learned they are every year. I was excited, but also afraid. Would I get the class right? Would the students come? We met all day to craft a list of admits, fueled by various snacks and many urns of coffee. The next day on March 12, 2016, I pulled up the preliminary list of admits intending to go over it one more time. I poured over that list for hours. I reread essays and CW evaluation comments. I recalled wonderful moments with Candidates and their families. I looked at statistics, played through my yield model a few more times. And then, I exhaled. I had to trust the reading process, Candidates’ Weekends and ultimately, myself. The Class of 2020 was going to be great.

And they were.

Four years later in March 2020, we learned campus was closing and remote learning and working would commence to keep the community safe. As Oliners do, folks sprung into action to create Fauxmencement. I knew I had to help. This was the graduation of my first class! I ran to the grocery store for bubbles and sidewalk chalk. I jumped at the chance to be one of the two readers for the students’ 13-words, epigrams to their Olin experience read out as our premature graduates cross the quickly constructed stage. On March 12, 2020, exactly four years from when I made the final call on my first round of admission decisions at Olin, the Class of 2020 was celebrated with origami caps, trash bag gowns, music, laughter and speeches.

As I stood surrounded by bubbles and pom poms next to a dear colleague, poised and ready to read the words of my first class, I exhaled again. In part this exhale was to stave off tears I knew would come. Tears of joy tinged with a little sadness and fear of what was to come in the world. But this exhale was mostly filled with pride for the Class of 2020, the community that upheld them and the chance to be a part of our corner of the world filled with big thinkers and dreamers and doers.

Major: Mechanical Engineering

My mom talks about the look I had on my face the first time we visited Olin. It was the summertime, so there were no students on campus. But when I saw the machine shop, she said I was like a kid putting his face against the window of a toy shop.

It was one of the deciding factors that brought me to Olin. Once you’re here, you find out you can use the machines almost whenever you want and that there are a lot of resources for you to learn. Whether you're using a machine for a class or a personal project or a project team, there are a ton of resources like shop assistants and shop staff that you can access.

Now, I’m a mechanical engineering major and one of the project managers for Olin Baja, a project team of about 30 students who design, fabricate, and race off-road racing vehicles.

Olin's education is very project-based. With the Baja team, you're doing the project just to do the project. I'm learning along the way, which is amazing. During the pandemic it's been the best way to interact with first year students who I ordinarily wouldn't get to hang out with.

I thought it was really cool that from day one there is a priority at Olin on doing stuff. I think the fact that we don't really have midterms or tests very often is a testament to that. A lot of times your final project is showing off what cool thing you learned or what cool thing you did.

There's a class traditionally taken your first semester of sophomore year, called Principles of Engineering. And they say the first day you decide what your project is going to be. The entire project is the journey of you getting there and demonstrating what you learned and what you did with a team of advisors.

During that class it really stood out for me that rather than staying up until 3 A.M. studying and flipping through books, you might be staying up but you're actively working on components or you're getting that arm to actuate the way you wanted to or you're standing by and waiting for your 3D print to finish. You're building and doing things.
 

Major: Engineering with a concentration in computing

I’ve always loved building things. Anything I can make with my hands or can do projects with, I’m very happy about.

I applied to other standard engineering schools like Caltech, MIT, Harvey Mudd, Stanford. The other colleges didn’t click for me like Olin did. I really loved that Olin is small. You get individualized attention from your professors. They eat lunch with you. And you get to know your teammates so well over the four years.

I’d rather go to a smaller school where I know everyone very well than a big school where I know a few people well.

One thing that surprised me when I got here was that I made a lot of friends really quickly. Everyone is so willing to teach you. And everyone is so smart. We act like goofballs around each other, but when it’s time to do work, my teammates are so smart.

I also love that most of my classes are project based. I had Introduction to Sensors and Measurements in my first year. That was a lot of time in the lab playing with circuits and prototyping on breadboards. I think my favorite class was Design Nature, where we got to build an entire play experience for fourth graders. It was very fun to get to think creatively about all the possible things a fourth grader might like.

Outside of class, I’m a member of Olin Electric Motorsports club — we just call it Formula. When I joined Formula, I didn’t know much about printed circuit board design. I didn’t even know what a circuit board was. The sub-team lead that I worked with is now one of my best friends. He guided me step-by-step through the design process and was so incredible nice and patient even when I asked the same question 10 times.

It was nice that I was learning something I wasn’t being taught in classes. Sometimes people only do PCB design as grad students and I was doing it my freshman year.

Helen Donis-Keller has crafted a diverse career that has spanned the arts and the sciences and back again.

After high school, she began earning her degree in graphic design and photography from the University of Cincinnati before a move to Canada cut her time in the program short. She began working as a graphic designer at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, instead.

“While I was there, I started grazing through different classes that the university offered,” says Donis-Keller. “I tried many subjects—anthropology, psychology, geography—before I discovered chemistry, which was like opening up a whole new world.”

Donis-Keller became interested in synthetic organic chemistry, which is a branch devoted to creating organic compounds. She also explored her innate love of the outdoors by studying biology. Eventually, she earned two bachelor’s degrees from Lakehead: one in natural sciences and one in honors biology.

As an undergraduate, Donis-Keller began doing research for various professors. She loved the scholarly pursuits, but she knew that to create her own projects, she would need a PhD. She went to Harvard and studied biochemistry and molecular biology under Walter Gilbert, who would eventually go on to receive the Nobel Prize for his work on developing a DNA sequencing method.

While at Harvard, Donis-Keller developed a method for RNA sequencing before starting her post-doc in virology at Harvard Medical School. Soon after, she received a call from her former mentor.

“Wally [Gilbert] was now a scientific advisor for Biogen, which was just getting started,” says Donis-Keller. “I loved the idea of working for a start-up, so I became their third employee as the assistant research director of molecular biology in the Cambridge branch of the company.”

After working at Biogen for a few years, Donis-Keller moved to Collaborative Research, Inc. to have more strategic control over her projects. Here, she began to map the human genome.

“My team and I spent five years on a genetic linkage map, and we eventually developed predictive tests for genetic diseases based on what we discovered,” says Donis-Keller. “We were the first group to identify the location of the gene that causes cystic fibrosis and ended up on front page of The New York Times for our human genome map.”

After almost a decade at Collaborative Research, funding for her genetic mapping project ran out, and Donis-Keller was offered a role at Washington University in St. Louis to continue her research.

“Working in higher education gave me the independence and intellectual freedom I’d been looking for,” says Donis-Keller.

Here, she continued identifying the genetic locations of other inherited disorders, such as multiple endocrine neoplasia; the diagnostic tests she developed became the standard of care to assess a particular kind of thyroid cancer.

But despite her scientific successes, Donis-Keller never stopped being interested in art and photography, working on this passion in her spare time, even as she traveled the world to speak at conferences.

“I had a sabbatical coming up, but I couldn’t leave campus because of the big lab I was running at the time, so I decided to stay and take drawing and print-making courses through the art department,” says Donis-Keller. “I realized I found so much joy in art that I couldn’t give it up ever again.”

Donis-Keller decided to make a change, so she got jobs for all her employees, then closed her lab and started an MFA program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She learned to work with different mediums and began experimenting with integrating art and science together, such as Genotype : Phenotype, which is a work of self-portraiture as a visual metaphor for the relationship between nature and nurture.

“I was finishing up my degree and beginning to wonder who would hire me now; I knew a standard university wouldn’t do a joint appointment in art and science,” says Donis-Keller. “That’s when I heard about Olin. They were looking for a biology professor, and they ended up creating this joint position for me so I could do both.”

One of the first professors at Olin, Donis-Keller teaches everything from digital photography to advanced biogenetics. Her latest course, “The Intersection of Biology, Art, and Technology (IBAT),” is a fluid, project-based class in which students explores the deep connections between these three disciplines together in an interesting, self-determined way—indicative of Olin’s student-centered focus.

Learn more about Donis-Keller’s work on her website.