Amulya Aluru ’23, MEng ’24, will head to the College of California at Berkeley for a PhD in molecular and cell biology PhD this fall. Aluru is aware of her undergraduate 6-7 main and MEng program, the place she labored on a computational venture in a biology lab, have ready her for the subsequent step of her tutorial journey.
“I’m much more snug with the unknown by way of analysis — and in addition life,” she says. “Whereas I’ve loved what I’ve performed up to now, I feel it’s equally worthwhile to attempt to discover new subjects. I really feel like there’s nonetheless much more for me to study in biology.”
Not like lots of her friends, nonetheless, Aluru received’t attain the San Francisco Bay Space by automobile, airplane, or practice. She is going to arrive by bike — a journey she started in Washington just some days after receiving her grasp’s diploma.
Displaying that science is accessible
Spokes is an MIT-based nonprofit that every 12 months sends college students on a transcontinental bike trip. Aluru labored for months with seven fellow MIT college students on logistics and planning. Since setting out, the group has bonded over their love of memes and cycling-themed nicknames: Hank “Handlebar Hank” Stennes, Clelia “Climbing Cleo” Lacarriere, Varsha “Vroom Vroom Varsha” Sandadi, Rebecca “Railtrail Rebecca” Lizarde, JD “JDerailleur Hanger” Hagood, Sophia “Speedy Sophia” Wang, Amulya “Aero Amulya” Aluru, and Jessica “Joyride Jess” Xu. The help minivan, carrying meals, baggage, and infrequently injured or sick cyclists, even earned its personal nickname: “Chrissy”, quick for Chrysler Pacifica.
“I actually needed to do one thing to problem myself, however not in a strictly tutorial sense,” Aluru says of her determination to affix the group and bike greater than 3,000 miles this summer time.
The Spokes group shouldn’t be biking throughout the nation solely to perform such a feat. All through their journey, they’ll offer quite a lot of science demonstrations, together with making concrete with Rice Krispies, demonstrating the physics of sound, utilizing 3D printers, and, in Aluru’s case, extracting DNA from strawberries.
“We’re going to be in a whole lot of actually totally different studying environments,” she says. “I hope to reveal that science may be accessible, even in case you don’t have a lab at your disposal.”
These demonstrations have been held in venues similar to a D.C. jail, an area camp, and libraries and youth facilities throughout the nation; their studying festivals had been even featured on a neighborhood information channel in Kentucky.
Some derailments
The group was beset with challenges from the primary day they began their journey. Aluru’s first day on the highway concerned driving to each bike store and REI retailer within the D.C. metro space to buy bike computer systems for navigation as a result of those the group had already bought would solely show maps of Europe.
4 days in and 4 Chrysler Pacificas later — the primary was unsafe attributable to bald tires, the second made a bizarre sound as they pulled out of the rental lot, and the third’s gasoline pedal stopped working over 50 miles away from the closest rental company — the group was again collectively once more in Waynesboro, Virginia, for the primary time since they’d set out.
Since then, they’ve had run-ins with native fauna — together with imply canines and a meaner turtle — tried to restore a tubeless bike that was not, in truth, tubeless, and slept in Chrissy the minivan after their tents acquired soaked and blew away.
Though it hasn’t all been clean driving, the group has made time for enjoyable. They’ve perfected the artwork of consuming a Clif bar whereas on two wheels, performed round on monkey bars in Colorado, met up with Stanford Spokes, loved kilos of ice cream, and downed gallons of lattes.
The group prioritized routes on bike trails, relatively than highways, as a lot as potential. Their educating actions are scheduled between visits to Nationwide Parks like Tahoe, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, and touring and mountaineering locations like Breaks Interstate Park, Mammoth Cave, and the Collegiate Peaks.
Aluru says she’s excited to see components of the nation she’s by no means visited earlier than, and expertise the terrain underneath her personal energy — apart from breaks when it’s her flip to drive Chrissy.
Rolling with the ups and downs
Aluru was only some weeks into her first Undergraduate Analysis Alternatives Program venture within the late professor Angelika Amon’s lab when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, rapidly remodeling her moist lab venture right into a computational one. David Waterman, her postdoc mentor within the Amon Lab, was educated as a biologist, not a computational scientist. Fortunately, Aluru had simply taken two laptop science lessons.
“I used to be in a position to have an enormous hand in formulating my venture and bouncing concepts off of him,” she recollects. “That helped me take into consideration scientific questions, which I used to be in a position to apply once I got here again to campus and began doing moist lab analysis once more.”
When Aluru returned to campus, she started work within the Web page Lab on the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Analysis. She continued working there for the remainder of her time at MIT, first as an undergraduate pupil after which as an MEng pupil.
The Web page Lab’s work primarily issues intercourse variations and the way these variations play out in genetics, improvement, and illness — and the Division of Digital Engineering and Pc Science, which oversees the MEng program, permits college students to pursue computational tasks throughout disciplines, regardless of the division.
For her MEng work, Aluru checked out intercourse variations in human top, a continuation of a paper that the Web page Lab printed in 2019. Top is an simply observable human trait and, from earlier analysis, is understood to be sex-biased throughout no less than 5 species. Genes which have sex-biased expression patterns, or expression patterns which might be increased or decrease in males in comparison with females, might play a job in establishing or sustaining these intercourse variations. By way of statistical genetics, Aluru replicated the findings of the sooner paper and expanded them utilizing newly printed datasets.
“Amulya has had a tremendous journey in our division,” says David Web page, professor of biology and core member of the Whitehead Institute. “There’s merely no stopping her insatiable curiosity and zest for all times.”
Working with the lab as a graduate pupil got here with extra day-to-day accountability and independence than when she was an undergrad.
“It was a shift I fairly appreciated,” Aluru says. “At instances it was difficult, however I feel it was a great problem: studying methods to construction my analysis by myself, whereas nonetheless getting a whole lot of help from lab members and my PI [principal investigator].”
Gearing up for the long run
Since departing MIT, Aluru and the remainder of the Spokes group have spent their nights tenting, sleeping in church buildings, and staying with hosts. They loved the longest day of the 12 months in a surprisingly “Brooklyn stylish” home, spent a lazy afternoon on a river, and pinky-promised to be in one another’s weddings. The group has additionally been hosted by, met up with, and run into MIT alums as they’ve crossed the nation.
As Aluru appears to the long run, she admits she’s not precisely positive what she’ll examine — however when she reaches the West Coast, she is aware of she’s not leaving what she’s constructed via MIT far behind.
“There’s going to be a small MIT group even there — a whole lot of my buddies are in San Francisco, and some individuals I do know are additionally going to be at Berkeley,” she says. “I’ve fashioned a group at MIT that I do know will help me in all my future endeavors.”
