This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What type of research are you doing through Mellon Mays?

I initially only applied to the Oberlin Summer Research Institute. Over the summer, I was researching tuition equity for undocumented students in Tennessee. That was just a really emotionally and mentally heavy project because I identified with the community. It was very heavy work and I realized that I couldn’t do that mentally for two years. I did my summer research and finished that thinking it was the last of my research experience. A couple of weeks before I got back on campus for this year, I actually got an email offer for a Mellon position. I’ve transitioned into Mellon, through taking a step back from my summer research and focusing on something entirely different. At the most recent Mellon Mays conference, I presented my summer research. Now, I have the mental space and energy to focus on my new project. For the next two years, I’m going to be researching Latinas’ relationship to spirituality in the southern part of the US, which is where I grew up. Specifically, I want to study the ways in which religion and religious groups have been used to help Latinas both form community amongst themselves. I also want to analyze how religious organizations can take away from the idea of the community. So, I really want to research both aspects of that. Obviously, this again is going to be a very personal project because I’m a Latina. I also grew up very religious and in the South. Making my research personal to me is very important because obviously I have my own stakes in it, but it’s also a way for me to connect and give back to my community. I want to produce meaningful work and to an extent like show that I’m worthy of this, that I am capable of doing stuff.

Do you want to continue researching after you graduate? 

I originally came to Oberlin wanting to be a Politics major and go to law school, but I switched to Comparative American Studies and Hispanic Studies. I still don’t know what I really want to do because I feel like research is still very new to me. I’m still trying to explore the stuff that I can do with that. I think the most natural next step would be to go to grad school. I definitely know that I want to work within and for my community. So obviously the broader Latinx community, the undocumented community, the immigrant community.

How have you found community as a Latinx, first generation student? 

I think coming to Oberlin was very hard. I don’t want to say it was a culture shock because I grew up with a lot of white people. I know how to move within white institutions. The only difference between back home and Oberlin is that I was really forced to find a new community. So, I kind of struggled at the beginning.

I feel like joining organizations like El Centro Volunteer Initiative, Obies for Undocumented Inclusion, and  La Alianza Latinx. That’s definitely given me a sense of community but also like friendships that have, I’m sure will last past these four years. When it comes to ECVI, the work I do is for my Bonner community service hours. However, I’ve never seen it as a job. I really enjoy being with my community there. I like working with the other board members, like those are genuinely my friends. Comparative American Studies Professor Gina Pérez is my role model on campus. I look up to her so much even before she was like my research mentor. In my first year she was on sabbatical, all the fourth-years would talk about how great Professor Pérez is. I always looked up to her even before I ever met her. So when I met her, it was super surreal because I finally got to meet the person everybody was talking about and she lived up to if not exceeded, every expectation I had. She’s been such a great help, obviously advocating for me through my research process. She’s a Latina professor that’s really big to me, and I really look up to her for that. Also, Vilmarie Pérez, assistant director for career readiness, is Puerto Rican and she’s been super helpful. She’s been a great help and is very big on speaking Spanish when we’re in Oberlin. Being able to use my native tongue with other people in a  predominantly white institution is very comforting to me.

What has it been like working with residents of Lorain and engaging with a Latinx community outside of Oberlin?

I feel like it’s silly when people say that they are trapped in an Oberlin bubble. If people made an effort to step out and learn about the community around them, that wouldn’t be the case. Obviously I’m very privileged to be a Bonner Scholar and have that connection to Lorain. It’s been great going to Lorain. My first year when I first started working with ECVI, we had a community engagement workshop and we learned about Lorain as a city. It’s labeled an international city. There’s a lot of Puerto Ricans, but also a lot of other Latinx communities. It’s been great going there even if it’s just like one Saturday a week. I’ve met a lot of people from different backgrounds and that’s the best part, like just being with other people and learning from them. I always say like, I definitely end up learning more from them than they will ever from me if I’m the one teaching the lessons. I think it’s really great because the way we do classes is somebody gives it in English and I give it in Spanish. It’s really great, using my skill to help other people. It’s a way for me to practice that skill and only strengthen it. So that’s been great. Just like all the other work we do with ECVI, I like fundraising for citizenship tests. A lot of the times I feel like the work that we do, we feel like, oh, is it really helping anybody? We’ve actually managed to fund at least five people’s citizenships. So that to me is like a really big deal. It really reminds me that the work that I’m doing every Saturday, even if I have to wake up at 8 a.m. on Saturday mornings, is really meaningful and it does make an impact on people and that’s really important to me.

What has your experience as a first-generation college student been like? 

It’s going to be hard because that’s just the nature of it. Like you’re the first person ever in your family to be here. I was the first person ever to make it past middle school and graduate from high school. It’s been hard but finding community, that’s really what gets you through it. A lot of it is taking self initiative because if you don’t do it, nobody else will for you. Obviously, I can’t call my mom and ask her to help me fill out my financial aid forms and I can’t call her to help me pay or cover my tuition. All of that stuff falls on me and it gets very heavy at times. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as a bad thing or something that people should pity me for because if anythin I learned from a very young age how to be self-sufficient and I learned how to be independent.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you tell me a bit about your life, your career in journalism, and how you got to where you are today? 

When I got to college, I took a 100-level writing course because I wanted to get better and feel more confident in writing. And in that class, we read a piece that I later learned was what we would call literary journalism. And I was like, “such an interesting way to want to learn about something is to just dive in headfirst.” When you’re in grad school, you’re writing lots of stories.  Right after I graduated, I was like, “Okay, I gotta keep writing.” I had gotten really interested in a genre of writing called participatory journalism. It’s basically like, there’s a world you want to learn about, and so you join that world. I learned that there was a thing called the National Beard and Mustache Championships. I was like, “why would anybody compete in that?” The way I figured I would answer the question is, “Okay, well, I’ll compete in it.” And so I grew this enormous beard over like nine months and wrote about this experience.

How did you decide to write about the A-10 Thunderbolt II, which is the focus of your book?

There were a lot of talks about how this airplane, the A-10, was going to be retired, and there was a lot of controversy because people were saying, “Well, hey, this airplane is really great. It’s really durable. It’s really well-designed. It’s really cheap. So why are we retiring it?” I wanted to understand that controversy a bit more, and I was like, it feels like there’s a story here. For me, what makes a compelling story is there has to be tension. And to me, one of the initial tensions was, hey, if this thing’s really well designed, and it’s still working, why do we want to replace it? Then I wondered if the person who’s largely responsible for its design is still around, like this airplane. 

I emailed him cold. It just turned out he had retired from working in the Pentagon, and now he owned a recording studio. His name’s Pierre Sprey. He was working in the Pentagon at the height of the Cold War. And so the story just kept getting bigger. This isn’t just a story about an airplane. This is a story about this remarkable group of individuals who were championing human-centered design.

What was your process for researching and writing the book?

I reached out to Pierre, and then he started connecting me with more folks to talk to. Because I had him vouching for me, these other people would agree to speak with me, and then they would put me in touch with folks, and this story kept unfurling. So it was a bit overwhelming for a while because there’s just so much to keep track of. 

I came up with a theory that the A-10 is like the Forrest Gump of airplanes, I feel like its story coincides with all these other moments in history and innovation and technology. As I had to tell the story of its design, I had to learn the history of how the Air Force came to be. When did airplanes first start being used in war? Why did we start using them? How were all these figures connected to all these important developments in aviation?

Could you tell me more about the subject matter of the book? 

The A-10 itself was first conceived of as an idea in the late ’60s, because there wasn’t an airplane that could perform what’s called close air support, which is to fly low to the ground and support troops. It wasn’t exactly the most exciting thing to design a really slow airplane at a time when we were putting people on the moon: we were designing airplanes that could go three times the speed of sound. This airplane can barely fly slower than a commercial airliner. 

The whole reason that A-10 has this really big gun is it needs something to destroy tanks effectively and cheaply. So once they had a gun, the GAU-8/A Avenger, they built an airplane around it, which is kind of this ingenious design principle. A lot of times, guns were added to airplanes after the fact. 

Pierre was like, “We need to study how airplanes have gotten damaged in the past so that we know how to make this thing not indestructible but survivable.” This was the philosophy of human-centered design. They wanted the engines mounted high as opposed to low to the ground so that they could take off from dirt roads. It has turbine engines, which had the benefit of not being a jet engine, which can go really fast but are very fragile. When the wheels retract up into the airplane, they actually still poke out of the bottom a little bit so that if there’s a problem where they can’t lower, the airplane can still land. If something shoots the wiring and eliminates the hydraulics, the plane can still remain in flight due to a mechanism called manual reversion, which is pretty rare. It’s not designed idealistically; it’s designed realistically. It’s designed with the expectation that chaos is unavoidable. Accidents will happen, and things will go wrong. 

Could you tell me about the public perceptions of the A-10?

Very early on in my writing process, I was deciding that I wanted to write about this thing. I had to reckon with the fact that I’m writing about design, but fundamentally, I’m writing about a weapon, and what I did not want to do in any way was glamorize a weapon or glamorize violence. The A-10 inspires a lot of fandom for a lot of positive reasons; it has saved a lot of lives. But there are also less savory opinions that essentially glamorize its violence. And I did not want to do that. I thought about that really long and hard, and the justification I came to early on is that the A-10 is really ugly. You’ll see all these images of A-10s that land, and they’re filled with bullet holes and oil, grease, and all of that. There are some observers who could see that and think that’s awesome. However, I think the more discerning observer will see an A-10 and realize this thing has experienced and participated in this tragic, horrific thing that is war. The really sleek fighter jets present a sinister illusion of war that may seem sterile. There is nothing sterile about the A-10. It doesn’t hide its purpose or what it’s participated in. I think that it’s important that it doesn’t hide that because it forces the viewer to reckon with what it does. And so I think that to me, the A-10 in the public consciousness, there’s one view that sees it in a not-so-serious way. But I think a lot of folks who are devoted to the A-10 are devoted to it because they are aware of its purpose and its job and the responsibility of that and the difficulty of performing that job.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What type of research do you conduct at Oberlin? 

My work essentially deals with the lifetime of what we call neurons, or brain cells. I am interested primarily from my graduate work about what happens when a neuron dies early, which is called neurodegeneration. My lab here is going to be researching that. We’re going to add in what happens to make a neuron a neuron. Hopefully, as my work continues, we’re going to understand the full life cycle of a neuron and start looking at the characteristics that are inherent to neurons that allow them to be so long-lived. If you don’t know, neurons are an extremely long-lived cell type. The neurons that are currently inside your nervous system were created before you were fully formed and born into this world. So, most of our neurons were developed while we were still in utero, and then they live for 70-plus years. No other cell type really does that. Neurons need to do a lot of really specialized things in order to first become a neuron, and then they need to do things to ensure that they can remain healthy and live long lives.

What are the applications of your research to medicine and treatment of disease?

My work has primarily focused on what’s going on in disease. So my graduate work focused on two different diseases: frontotemporal dementia, which is an early onset form of dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. These two are what we call neurodegenerative diseases because they mean our neurons are breaking down. What’s interesting is that when people started looking at patients who had either FTD or ALS, they saw that there were some similarities between how their neurons were dying. So, I study one similarity between the two, which has to do with protein pathology. Our neurons are made up of all of our cells, and are made up of things called proteins. These are the things in your cells that do everything they do. You have thousands, hundreds of thousands of proteins in your cell, and I study one called FUS, or fused in sarcoma. It’s really important for keeping ourselves healthy. My lab is interested in how it might help neurons develop and how it keeps cells healthy. Unfortunately, when it stops working the way it’s supposed to work, that leads to neurons dying. 

Is your lab ongoing right now?

I have a few students who are going to be starting during Winter Term. There are some boxes in the corner of my office that have some of the equipment. I’m ordering equipment and the lab’s going to be set up during Winter Term. My hope is that I can do the same thing that happened when I was here, where I worked with faculty who believed in me and helped foster my curiosity through research.

Were you interested in neuroscience at Oberlin right off the bat, or did you switch into the field?

When I was a student here, I thought I would study Biology and be in the department. I knew pretty quickly that I didn’t want to be a medical doctor. When I was a student here, they were still allowing you to use your Advanced Placement exam credit to count for Biology 100. When you go to med school, they want to see you still taking those intro classes. Since I didn’t want to go to med school, I felt like I could use my AP credit and move into the next level up. So I decided to take Introduction to Neuroscience, the same class I’m teaching right now. I just fell in love with it. I really loved when the faculty members asked a question in class, and they would say, “No one knows the answer to that question.” I just saw neuroscience as this really exciting field where a lot was still open to being discovered. I think I’m really lucky because I came into Oberlin with low self-esteem. I thought that neuroscience was going to be only for the smartest people. I was lucky that faculty members, friends, and the whole department don’t carry on this idea that neuroscience is the pinnacle of science. If you are passionate, if you like it, then you can do it. I tell all my students they can all be neuroscientists if they want to be.

Why did you return to Oberlin?

As you will learn, Oberlin has a way of drawing you back. I’m sure people have said this, but the people who say it are the ones who get drawn back. I think Oberlin was really good for me because it allowed me to grow into a more confident and assured person in a place where there was less judgment of people. Everywhere has its issues. I went off and I knew I wanted to work at a small liberal arts college for my career. I really valued the education I got at Oberlin as a small liberal arts school — I believed in the system, so I wanted to be a part of that. When you finish graduate school, you do some post-training called a postdoctoral fellowship. I was in my postdoc, and I was going on the job market. When you go on the job market, not everywhere is going to have an opening. You know there are only so many schools, and you’re limited if you know that there’s a certain type of institution you want to be at. And I think luck has a lot to do with it. When I went on the job market, Oberlin was looking to hire. And when I was applying for the job, I said to myself one of the reasons I was applying is that being faculty is a complex job. We wear a lot of hats. And so being able to be faculty with a group of people who I already know, who I already know believe in me, who I already know that working with them will let me learn so much, that was powerful for me.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is OSCA’s role on campus? 

When I think about OSCA’s role on campus, one of the things that first comes to mind is “learning and labor.” I think that Oberlin was built on this notion that learning on its own is not sufficient, that we learn best when we are also getting our hands dirty — the stuff that we will be spending most of our lives outside of school doing. So that’s one of the big things that OSCA provides. The other thing is that there’s a lot of isolation, not just at Oberlin but in the world of secondary education at large. People come to college often with a very specific specialty in mind, a path of study that they’re pursuing, and we have this tendency to kind of silo ourselves, and I think OSCA exists as a counterweight to that. OSCA is around so that we don’t all get stuck doing our own individual thing, focusing on this and that, staying in practice rooms for six hours. You can do that, but then you can also go to a meal with 80 of your best friends afterwards. OSCA’s role is to make sure that we don’t fall into these patterns of siloization. I think it does that for OSCA members, but I also think that it does that for the Oberlin student community at large. Whether you are a guest at a co-op meal or just somebody who’s coming to a jazz party at Tank, I think that having that there is valuable not just to its members but to student life.

How does OSCA function financially?

We pay the College for each bed, around $4,000 a semester, $8,000 a year, whether or not we fill that bed. There’s this imbalanced equation in which OSCA members can join Residence Life at any time, and ResLife members can only join OSCA at the very beginning of the semester. There’s this constant trickling of OSCA students into ResLife, and it’s not reciprocal. This means that we have all of these empty beds all of the time that we’re paying for that could very easily be filled. Due to the rent contract’s insistence that it would be an undue administrative burden on ResLife to let students join OSCA throughout the year, we incur these giant financial losses. It’s a loss in all the obvious ways. We would love to have the people that are excited about being in OSCA be able to actually join. It’d be great for our communities. It’s a loss in the obvious financial sense that we’re paying for these beds, but it’s also a loss for Oberlin in that they are concerned about having enough beds to house their students. They’re building this new $55 million dorm, and we have beds. We would be happy to fill these beds. So it’s weird to be in that situation while there is also a housing shortage amongst Oberlin students. 

Can you talk about OSCA’s sustainability practices?

OSCA has always been committed to sustainable housing and dining. We purchase well over half of our foods from local vendors. I can say that as somebody who worked as an All-OSCA food coordinator, a huge chunk of our food comes from within an hour of Oberlin. We’re also very concerned with food waste — always doing what we can to kind of calibrate the amount of food that we’re cooking to make sure that everybody has as much food as they want while also reducing the amount that we throw away at all times. When you look at the amount of food waste generated by OSCA and the amount generated by Campus Dining Services, OSCA is throwing out so much less food, and the food that we are throwing out is more environmentally sound.

What challenges is OSCA facing? How are you working to counteract negative trends related to enrollment and diversity? 

Right now our focus is on ensuring OSCA’s continued financial viability for the years to come. The rent contract that was renegotiated in 2020 between Oberlin and OSCA that went into effect in 2021 has put a significant financial hardship on OSCA, and it meant that we had to nearly double our prices for room and board. I think now we’re also talking about the value of community and the value of consensus and these kinds of learning opportunities. When OSCA was originally founded, it was founded based on basic economic cooperative principles — if we pool our money, we are able to receive the benefits of economies of scale. And ultimately, people that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford an Oberlin College education will be able to afford it. That’s the foundation of OSCA going back 70 years. 

Unfortunately, because of the College’s policies, we’ve had to raise our rates a lot higher than we would like. It affects our ability to maintain cultural diversity in this space when the College reduces students’ financial aid on a dollar-for-dollar basis around the savings that they would incur from being in OSCA. The question of cultural diversity is a super important one that OSCA is trying to reckon with, but I would say that our hands, in a lot of ways, are tied by the College and the kind of financial burden they’ve placed on us. 

Are there any new initiatives that OSCA is currently working on? 

The things that are really exciting right now are a lot of student-led things. We have the revival of the Brown Bag Co-op, which is super exciting. It was around for many years and then went dormant after COVID-19 struck. What excites me about the Brown Bag Co-op is it’s not offering the kind of intense in-person community that a lot of the other co-ops offer, but what it is doing is using OSCA’s relationship with the College to provide more options for students. I know from my individual course of study how important what we eat is to our individual identity formations. When the College imposes these restrictions on what you have access to, how we identify is restricted in this corresponding way. I think that OSCA opening up the alternative for people to eat the way that they want to eat is a big part of the kind of self-actualization that happens in college — the understanding of who you are.

The other thing that we’re really excited about is the potential revival of the Kosher Halal Co-op. The College has been working with us on transferring alumni money that they were once in possession of to us so that we can execute on that fund. That’s really exciting for me. You know, I grew up hearing all sorts of stories about the Kosher Halal Co-op from my dad, my aunt, my cousin, who were all in it. We would hear about Passover seders that they would stay at and talk until they heard the birds chirping; there was this intense spiritual energy going on there. 

You mentioned that you’re an OSCA legacy. What does it mean to be part of that lineage? 

The OSCA that my dad was in is very different from the OSCA that I am in. My dad was there for naked mud wrestling at Harkness House. It’s harder to get away with that now. One of the most valuable parts about being in OSCA is that it connects you to this larger lineage of people who’ve been committed to these communities for a long time. We had the OSCA alumni ice cream social this past Saturday on the Tank lawn, and there was a record number of alumni that attended. It’s incredible to hear these old stories. In a lot of ways they’re interesting from a narrative standpoint, but also they help us imagine different ways of organizing our own communities. I think that when I first got to OSCA, a part of me was like, “This is so awesome.” Also, I kind of wish that I was here in the ’80s. But then I realized that having this history is its own luxury. It’s a thing that they didn’t have in the ’80s, this long archive to pull from. It’s this great gift to have that history to lean on when things are difficult. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. This works, and it’s been working for a long time, and people look back on it as the foundational part of their Oberlin experience.

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you talk a little about your role within the American Council on Education? 

 I have been at the American Council of Education for 16 years. Together, we work on federal financial aid programs and other kinds of policies. For me personally, tax is the core of my portfolio. That’s for individuals saving for college, paying for the cost of college, and then repaying the cost of it, for example your student loan. Alongside tax, I started covering healthcare issues when the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — was being written in 2009. I became kind of an expert in information related to student health insurance. Now I’m focused on student mental health issues. Along with healthcare, I cover labor and employment issues. I also for a time focused on immigration, particularly the DREAM Act and trying to get relief for Dreamers. Finally, for the last 16–18 months, I did a lot of work on what we would call “divisive concepts.” What you’re seeing in some states, including in Ohio, is imposed restrictions on what’s being taught or what’s being discussed, like in the areas of race or tenure. 

In the past you worked in litigation and civil rights law. What caused your shift into higher education?  

I was a litigator particularly early in my career in Boston. When I went to law school, I thought I wanted to be Atticus Finch from the original book. I went to Northeastern Law School, and they have internships during law school, where I worked with a civil rights lawyer in Boston. That’s what I thought I wanted to do — work as a litigator. So after clerking and then a year working in criminal defense, I worked for a firm and did some plaintiff civil rights, mostly police misconduct cases. I did a lot of employment discrimination work, and then my career as a litigator evolved in a different direction. I then decided I was going to do a real career shift. So I worked for an Obie who was Senator Ted Kennedy’s chief labor staffer. It became an opportunity to showcase my skills as a lawyer. But also, it was sort of a lift to get out of being seen as a litigator and to get some experience working in policy. But in 2002, which was a bad year for Democrats, I left the Hill and worked for the Jewish Federations. I worked for them for a couple of years, and as a lobbyist. Then I worked for an organization called Independent Sector, which represents major foundations like the United Way and the American Red Cross. I worked for them for a couple years, and then I came to the American Council on Education.

You’ve spent most of your life working in civil rights and activism. Did Oberlin help cultivate that passion? 

I grew up in a home where my parents were very involved. When I was a little boy, during the presidential campaign in ’72, I remember when John F. Kennedy’s former press secretary came to our house for a campaign fundraiser. It was always just a part of who I am. So at Oberlin, I wouldn’t say that the school sparked that passion. It just allowed me to be in a place where people were really concerned about the right issues, and then they recognized the importance of them and tried to find their own ways to engage. For example, when I was a student, it was during South African apartheid, and I remember being involved in a protest where we took over the President of Oberlin’s office. 

How does the overturning of affirmative action affect how you operate within the American Council of Education? 

The American Council of Education released a statement when the decision came out about how disappointed we were. We will continue to do programming and other materials to assist our member institutions to figure out how to navigate this post race-conscious admissions world. This will always be complicated and difficult in certain ways, because its impact is way beyond admissions. And we can certainly look at what it means for institutions like Oberlin. If you look at the array of institutions that are eligible for federal financial aid, they use race as part of an assessment of a candidate’s application. But the overturning of affirmative action means they will not be able to assess race directly as part of admissions any longer. Institutions will have to use race-neutral admission strategies. The court itself said that when students apply, they can choose to tell their story. If race is part of their story, that’s okay, and schools could consider the story of that individual student. So what does it mean for departments like financial aid? Can it be permissible to have financial aid that is distributed based on race? It is going to play out in very complicated ways on campus. This will happen in the coming years as higher education confronts this new reality and what it means for an array of departments on campus. There’s already a conversation about legacy admissions with complaints being brought up at the Department of Education. 

What’s the best way to navigate higher education as a student after the overturning of affirmative action?

I think if the institution is committed to a diverse student body, then we can still enact change. And we’re not Harvard. We don’t have a multi-billion dollar endowment like Yale or Princeton. So there will be finite resources that we can throw at the problem. But what we can try to do is ensure that there’s more money for need-based student aid and try to find ways for alumni to contribute or encourage more programs such as the Pell Grant, as that’s one of the race-neutral proxies that schools will use. I believe that an institution like Oberlin has a community dedicated to change. I would encourage the students to push the leadership of the institution. I am confident that the Oberlin community will want to make sure that the institution does what it can to try to ensure that this is a diverse campus — that we draw on students from all across the United States, but particularly underrepresented students.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What kind of student were you when you were at Oberlin? 

I was a combination of intense and intensely distractible. I was the sort of student who was very passionate about certain classes and subjects and got really into it and probably talked too much in class, but I was also very easily thrown off course. 

So, I was really into the classes, really loved the liberal arts atmosphere, and really loved all the learning I got outside of class, but maybe made a little bit too much of the array that was at my disposal.

What were some of the courses that you really enjoyed, and what were some of the distractions that were most gripping? 

I was a Religion major, and I was very into a sequence taught by the current Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences David Kamitsuka on modern religious thought in the West. I took several courses with him on that subject, and what I liked about them was that there was a mix of the philosophical and the practical that really drew my attention. 

And that was true also of political theory courses. I took a lot of political theory courses with former Politics Chair Harlan Wilson, who’s no longer here. One minute we’d be talking about something super abstract and seemingly arcane, and the next minute it’d be like, “Well, so should we change our voting system?” and I really love that connection.

Unofficially, I spent a lot of time listening to weird stuff in the Conservatory. Fairchild Chapel had a running stream of TIMARA composers, and other students who were more on the sort of “out there” side of things, who would often perform there. 

I came to school with no knowledge of music, music composition, sound composition, or any of that stuff. So, to encounter a lot of people who thought very deeply and very strangely about sound, and performances with people sticking candles in weird orifices and all sorts of stuff that was really just out there — the performance culture at the time at Oberlin was about pushing you out of your comfort zone in a lot of different kinds of ways — I found that to be thrilling, and I do think it kind of changed the course of my life in some ways. 

I don’t think I’d be teaching this radio class if I hadn’t had those experiences. One of the reasons I’m so excited to be working with Tom Lopez in the TIMARA department is if I hadn’t watched so many TIMARA department performances that I didn’t understand and didn’t know how to respond to, and then have people who were patient enough to tell me that I was stupid and say what I should have been listening for, then I never would have gotten into radio, because I really got into it as a listener first. 

After Oberlin, your dissertation at the University of Chicago explored post-fascist Italy. I’m interested in what made you move from working as a historian to working on Invisibilia. 

The dissertation was about stumbling onto things that I just thought were strange and fascinating and I got a little obsessed with, and it was as much about meeting people from the past who I really fell in love with as it was about pursuing some divine questions. 

It was also about hearing echoes, many of them unpleasant echoes, between the period that I was studying — fascist and post-fascist Italy — and the period that I was living through and the ways that people were thinking about fascism, or about populism, or about politics in the present. Those echoes really reinforced my sense that I was going in a good direction, but I also knew that, as a historian, I had a responsibility to take a certain distance from that presentist orientation. 

One of my research topics was about the role of what people call public intellectuals in the cultural reconstruction after fascism. It’s people who are not just academics or scholars writing for other scholars, but people who are doing behind-the-scenes work of editing journals, creating radio programs, curating art exhibitions, or other things that are really trying to engage the public in a variety of ways.

At a certain point, I just thought, well, if I really want to understand some of this stuff, I need to get some practice working in the public sphere. Invisibilia in particular struck me as a program that was doing a lot of really interesting work in that domain of public intellectuals. Social science and scientific concepts that were typically reserved for a sort of elite were being refigured and reimagined, not only in a popularizing way, but actually in a creative way that brought something new to them. I would have the experience of having read a book, then hear it talked about on Invisibilia and have something totally new revealed to me. That was very exciting, and I wanted to see what it was like to do that.

I’m curious how you brought this idea of being a public intellectual to your work with Invisibilia.

A lot of the work that I found most fulfilling at Invisibilia was not work that you would see my byline on. Work that was collaborative, behind the scenes, in a supporting role for people who were working through ideas and working through problems, was the most fulfilling. For the piece that we listened to today, “The Weatherman,” working with artists and storytellers to refine their work views, I discovered that I had some skills as a consultant in those places. I say that because I think that people hear the term “public intellectual” and they think that it means someone who wants to stand up on a soapbox, tell people what is important, and be an activist. There’s certainly space for that, but I have always felt that it’s almost the opposite. It’s about being willing to take yourself out of your ego and put yourself in a place where you can make collaborative work with people who have a whole range of skills that you don’t have. You can be a small piece of something that can touch a lot more people than the thing that you could have done by knowing how to do everything from A to Z. I think a lot of scholarship in the humanities is focused on, “You have to know a topic completely, write a great article about it, then write a book that’s built on a bunch of those articles.” For me, letting go of some of that vision of authority and being in more of a supporting, creative position was a way to reach a different kind of public.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you explain the discoveries your team made? 

What we’re doing is searching for, and what we believe we have evidence of, is gravitational waves in the universe. First, let’s talk about what a gravitational wave is. A gravitational wave is analogous to a light wave, but instead of being electromagnetic, it’s related to the deformation of spacetime itself. We live in spacetime, and we think of it as almost like a membrane, like a rubber sheet. If you were to push down quickly on one side of it, a wave would propagate outward along this rubber sheet at the speed of light. A gravitational wave is a propagation of a deformation of spacetime that spreads outward or propagates outward at the speed of light. It was predicted by Einstein in his theory of gravity. Einstein predicted gravitational waves in 1916, and they were confirmed to exist in 2015 by the LIGO experiment, which detected gravitational waves from two merging black holes.

What we are doing — and we in this case are several hundred scientists around the world — is trying to detect gravitational waves, but in a much different wavelength regime. Just like the electromagnetic spectrum has a whole range of phenomena along it, we believe that there’s also a gravitational wave spectrum out there as well as the short wavelength gravitational waves that the LIGO collaboration detected. 

Now, we’re trying to detect gravitational waves, but in a different wavelength regime, similar to how the electromagnetic spectrum has various wavelengths. We believe there are long-wavelength gravitational waves with wavelengths of light-years. That’s trillions of years in length. These waves are passing through us right now, slightly deforming and stretching us as they go by. So it’s all pretty phenomenal.

What are you trying to detect within your research? 

We’re looking for a multitude of supermassive black hole systems in distant galaxies. These black holes, each a billion times the mass of the sun, orbit each other, creating gravitational waves. Our experiment involves hundreds of scientists worldwide.

Gravitational waves squeeze and stretch spacetime as they pass by. Imagine the Earth with a gravitational wave coming from above. During one half of the wave’s cycle, it pushes in, and during the other half, it stretches out.

Gravitational waves cause Earth to stretch and compress periodically, affecting the timing of pulses from pulsars. Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit beams of radio waves, much like a lighthouse. We use them as precise celestial clocks because their pulses are incredibly regular.

When gravitational waves affect Earth, they cause pulses from different pulsars to arrive either slightly early or slightly late, depending on their position relative to each other. If two pulsars are 90 degrees apart in the sky, one will be early while the other is late, creating an anticorrelation. If they are in the same part of the sky, there will be a correlation between their pulse timings.

By observing these timing correlations or anticorrelations among pulsars, we can indirectly detect gravitational waves. This is the essence of our experiment, and it involves many pulsars, each acting as a precise gravitational wave detector.

What drew you to studying gravitational waves? 

It was the pulsars. Initially, a group of us were drawn together because we loved pulsars. We were incredibly impressed by what pulsars could achieve in terms of high precision science. High precision is really crucial here. Over time, as the collaboration grew, we brought in people from the gravitational wave community because that was the natural way to expand. These were people who didn’t know anything about pulsars or radio telescopes, but they knew about gravitational waves and how to detect them, and they were well-versed in sophisticated data analysis techniques that we were not using at the time. I’ve truly fallen in love with gravity and some of the amazing things we’ve been studying. It’s been a real pleasure for me.

News coverage has described this as a major discovery. Can you explain a little bit about why this is important?

Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of nature. And in some sense, it’s the most familiar. We all experience it constantly. But there are also deep puzzles connected to gravity. But let me go in a slightly different direction, in terms of this being fundamental research in science. We’re constantly testing our theories, right? We have this beautiful edifice of Einstein’s theory of gravity: his theory of general relativity. And it’s been tested in numerous, numerous ways. 

But, as I mentioned, there are deep puzzles within physics. In particular, how does gravity connect with quantum mechanics, our fundamental theory of the super small? The theories are radically different from each other. There’s no natural connection point between them. And this has been recognized as a fundamental problem in physics for at least 50 years. And so perhaps there’s something incomplete about Einstein’s theory of gravity. There’s something missing. Is it possible that through our observations of celestial gravitational waves we could find some deviations of Einstein’s theory of gravity and find some fundamental reworking making it more complete? That’s one possibility. Another aspect that makes this work very exciting and I think very fundamental, is that we don’t understand our universe, and in particular, we don’t completely understand the earliest stages of our universe, when galaxies were just forming.

You were mentioning how you think that this research has a big future. Can you tell us what you think people would do with this research? 

I fully expect that this experiment will continue for the next 30 to 50 to 100 years. And over 30 to 50 to 100 years, or even just within the next five years, we will be detecting an individual supermassive black hole pair. Another area that we’re expecting to go again over five, 10, 50 years is more fully characterizing what this background of gravitational waves is. Is it the same from all directions in the sky? 

How has working at Oberlin contributed to your research? 

This research has been tremendously exciting for Oberlin students through the years. I tallied it up, and since 2007, there have been 48 Oberlin students who have worked on this research with me. We have had a blast, and we’ve gone to telescopes like the Arecibo Observatory and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. We’ve gone to conferences in the U.S. and around the world to talk about gravitational waves, pulsars, and this particular specialty we have at Oberlin.

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

You originally attended Fisk University before transferring to Oberlin College. What made you move to continue your studies? 

There’s a very specific reason I went off to Fisk originally. I had pushy Southern Black parents who said to me one day, “You’re going to go downtown and take a test. If you pass it, you will go to the early entrance program at Fisk University.” I was 15 years old, so going off to Fisk was the last thing I wanted to do. But I just went downtown, and rather than checking all the wrong answers — that’s all I had to do to fail the test — I checked the right answers. So I went to Fisk. It was an exceptionally wonderful first semester, especially for a child of social justice activists, because I was at a place where activism was very much what people did. But that January, my father passed away, and it was a profound trauma for me. And so my mom and my sister said, “You’re not doing very well. Why don’t you transfer to Oberlin?” because my sister was at Oberlin majoring in Voice and Piano. So that’s the story of how I got to Oberlin. And once there, I did find my place and graduate. I claim both schools, and very few people can tell the story as passionately as I can. Being at a historically Black university and then going to Oberlin was an experience, due to Oberlin being the first in our nation to welcome African Americans and the first to welcome women to a collegiate experience. It was at Oberlin where I discovered anthropology, which in so many ways became the lens through which I see the world.

In much of your work, you speak to upholding African-American studies and anthropology pedagogy. Can you talk about how those fields had an effect on your accomplishments?

As a part of getting my doctorate in anthropology, my first teaching job was at Washington State University in Pullman, WA. It was there that I was the founding director of one of the first Black Studies programs in the United States. It was a very specific time in American history; I was also highly engaged as an activist in opposition to the war in Vietnam and apartheid and was a part of the Black Power movement. I even went to jail with my students. We did those things to demand there be more Black students on campus, more Black faculty, and a Black Studies program. 

After a number of years at Washington State University, I moved with my family to Amherst, MA, and joined an extraordinary group of scholar-activists in a program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In that program, I talked and worked with a multitude of scholars like Shirley Graham Du Bois and John Bracey Jr., and that program still bears the name of W. E. B. Du Bois. There was a time when we invited Chinua Achebe to speak to students. We determined that it was our responsibility to be close to the best in scholarship and the best in social justice activism. And I think we didn’t do a bad job at it. I think it’s so important to expand into African-American studies and to expand what it means to share that knowledge as an education system, especially in the world we live in today. 

You were the first female African-American president of the historically Black Spelman College. Can you talk about what it was like working at that institution? 

I went to Spelman not as a professor, but as the president. And folks rightfully asked why: at an institution founded in 1881 by two righteous white women, Spelman had never had a Black woman president, even though it began as an institution for the education of Black women. The simple and correct answer is patriarchy. The presidency was not what I had on my wishlist. I remember very well returning to my office at Hunter College, where I was a happy professor, and there were two notes on my desk. Some of my main mentors urged me to call them as soon as possible. I connected with my mentors, each of whom said, “You will apply for the presidency of Spelman.” To which I responded, “But I’m a happy professor. Why do I want to do that?” They insisted, and look at what happened. I think there’s a lesson there, and it is, of course, that mentors often see in their mentees what their mentees cannot see in themselves. 

Do you think that your time at Oberlin is what encouraged you to work at Spelman College as the first female African-American president? 

I don’t think there’s any question on how Oberlin pushed me towards eventually working at Spelman College. When I look at my life’s journey, there are clear periods at Oberlin when I was urged to continue social justice and public intellectualism. And while you can go to Oberlin and say, “I don’t give a hoot about the rest of the world,” I didn’t do that. And it’s because of that I have no doubt about the influence of my years at Oberlin. My years at Oberlin helped to solidify what had already been a pattern of public intellectualism and social justice activism. 

You recently received the National Humanities Medal, which is given to individuals who have deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities and broadened our citizens’ engagement with history, literature, languages, philosophy, and other subjects in the humanities. Can you talk about what it means for you to receive that award? 

It’s more than a notion, and I feel intensely privileged and grateful to have received one of the National Humanities Medals from President Joe Biden. I’m not gonna try to minimize that it was an incredible honor. And when I accepted the award in the company of the other recipients, I have to say some of the joy was just being in that company. I remembered words that my mom used to use, kind of old-fashioned language, when she would say, “A woman’s going to be known by the company she keeps.” And to be in that company was such an honor, standing with those individuals who have done so much not only as scholars but as social justice activists. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

How did you start working at the Review? 

We don’t really have freedom of speech back in Türkiye, so I’d been wanting to get involved with the Review, but I knew I wasn’t a strong writer in English. Editor-in-chief Kushagra Kar was talking to me during the end of spring semester, and he was like, “We have this position [for Social Media Manager], and you should apply.” I had the passion for graphic design, so I was like, “I’ll give it a chance, and maybe I’ll be able to stay over here for the summer and hang out with friends.” I always wanted to be a part of a community. Honestly, it was one of the best decisions I made here. 

What do you think was your greatest accomplishment while you were a social media and web manager? 

I think the greatest accomplishment is that the Review gets recognition now, because that’s what I wanted when I got the job. From Kar, I knew how much work you guys were doing, but not many people understand and appreciate that. 

Tell me a little about your majors.

I wasn’t thinking of doing neuroscience — I knew I was interested in the brain, but I was determined not to become a doctor like my parents. I was just gonna do computer science. 

I started doing computer science and my question was, “Why are we not interested in how computers learn like humans?” Because the human brain influences computer science a lot. I’m really interested in the point where both of these come together because I think they can be really helpful for a lot of things.

For the longest time, I wanted to build these prosthetics that you can just use with your brain. I want to be a researcher that will create helpful things in health care.

Can you tell me a little bit about your neuroscience work at the Van Valen Lab at Caltech?

We’re getting funding from Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s, funded by Michael J. Fox. Our job is to develop a model that will trace 3D neuron images so that we can map neuron networks in the brain so that we can understand how Parkinson’s arises, and detect it and treat it better. 

What I’m doing is basically going through the literature, finding data, standardizing it, and putting it into the workflow. We are only on the first phases of it, so it’s mostly data-based right now. 

Looking back at your time at Oberlin, what advice would you give your first-year self?

You don’t have to do everything. I understand fear of missing out is a real thing with COVID-19 and double majors and minors and everything, and I know that’s like literally every Oberlin person’s experience. But just make mistakes, you know? 

I feel like I didn’t really go into that, and this week I’ve been like, “What am I doing? I’m never gonna go back to college again.” So what if you did this one mistake, or it wasn’t the best decision, or you stayed out instead of studying for your exam the next morning? 

What do you think you will take away from your time working at the Review? 

People are unpredictable. I would try to do polls — they didn’t seem to attract attention, but the thing you guys are doing now where people put their opinions seems to be attracting people. You would think since you’re probably swiping through stories, it would be easier to do polls. Stuff like that was really interesting. I learned a lot and also improved a lot with graphic design.

I got used to being out of my comfort zone, which was nice, but also I had supportive people with me, so I didn’t feel like I was going to get trashed or anything.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You started working at the Review the first semester of your fourth year. What initially prompted you to apply, and how has the job shaped your last year of college?

I was hoping to get a job this year to get some of my own income, and then I saw the Campus Digest announcement about the Review hiring. My mom is a copy editor, and my dad is a writer — I’m a bit of an editing nepo baby, if you will — and I thought it’ll be fun to try it out, because copy editing is something that I’ve grown up around and am pretty familiar with, without having done it as a job before. And so I thought, “Hey, why not?”

I’ve definitely gotten a wider view of campus culture, and what’s going on in the Oberlin community as well. As a Production editor, you get to read all the stories from all the different sections, so getting a really broad view of everything was really cool. Also, I think working at the Review improved my work ethic, because you’re forced to get a certain amount of things done in a certain period of time. There were, of course, some nights in Production where I distracted myself and my coworkers by, uh, discussing the pieces that we were editing.

Critically discussing.

Critically discussing the pieces that we were editing. But I think, generally, it was a good break from schoolwork while still involving intellectual brainwork.

You mentioned your mom is a copy editor, but you didn’t want to be one. Explain your reluctance to go down her path — did it feel like the equivalent of inheriting the family general store?

I think I just felt like I shouldn’t just do what my mom does; I should forge my own path and find something else. But it’s turned out to be something that my mom and I can really bond over. Like when she visited last semester, I was showing her the edits I made on a piece that really needed to be beaten into shape. And we were both laughing over, you know, silly stylistic or syntax things that most other people wouldn’t notice. And it’s kind of cool to connect with someone else with a copy editor’s brain who notices that kind of thing, and to become someone with a copy editor’s brain.

I wonder if you have any childhood memories associated with copy editing.

Yeah, actually I do. When I was in kindergarten, our teacher told us, “Remember that ‘a lot’ is two words, and not one — and go home and tell your parents, because they might not know.” And so I went home and told my mom, and I was angry that she knew already, when knowing that was literally her job. I was frustrated that I couldn’t be smarter than my mom when I was a child.

But also, I remember looking over her shoulder while she was editing, and if she was looking at a specific instance of a stylistic inconsistency, she would show me what that meant, and point out the patterns to me in the wording that she was looking out for. And then when I got older, every so often, if I stepped into her home office and she was working on something, we would talk about a specific edit that she was making, and I would give my suggestions — and sometimes she would take them. It’s a kind of beautiful thing that I can now take that and bring it into my own life.

Would your parents edit your high school essays?

My mom never really butted in and was like, “Show me your essay so I can edit it.” But there have definitely been many circumstances where I would show my parents a piece of writing that I’d done for school, just to show them, and I could tell when my mom was reading it, she was copy editing it in her head. And I was like, “Mom, I see what you’re doing. That’s not what I’m looking for right now.” And she’s like, “I’m sorry, I can’t turn it off.”

What made you realize you actually like being a copy editor?

It was a gradual realization that this was something that I both was good at and really enjoyed doing. I think I’ve always been a good editor, but I haven’t had an editing job before, so I didn’t consider it as a career path. I was thinking about being a translator for a while, and being an editor is not too far away from that. But I realized that my Mandarin Chinese skills would have to improve exponentially in order to reach a place where I could feasibly do translation as a career. So editing, I think, is a way for me to still work with the intricacies of language, but in a language that I’m already fluent in.

Have you noticed overlaps in the skills you use as a translator and as a copy editor?

Yeah, I definitely see similarities between translation and editing. A lot of translation is combing through specific word choices. Also, you have to pay a lot of attention to sentence structure because often, the sentence structure of the language you’re translating from won’t completely match onto the language you’re translating into. And so, you have to figure out how to make things make sense in the language you’re translating into, while also choosing how much of the original language you want to carry into your translation.

As a copy editor, sometimes you’ll get handed an article that makes certain claims that it can’t necessarily back up, and so you have to figure out how to reword some of the author’s writing so that we don’t get sued, while also doing justice to the author’s argument.

What was your favorite moment in the Production room this year?

Hands down, “pleasurable jolt of inundation.” For our readers, I’m gonna give a little context — that was a line in one of the pieces that I looked at, and I thought, one, “This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” and two, “We cannot publish this.” Production has a good amount of inside jokes of really strange phrasing that has come up in some of our pieces, that we have absolutely adored, but had to say goodbye to.

Something else that I enjoy is — well, I won’t say it’s hazing, because hazing is not condoned in the state of Ohio. But, I would say it is an initiation ritual for Production editors to have to edit a piece either about the Gibson’s Bakery litigation or Professor Mahallati — specifically, to have to do a fact read on a Gibson’s or a Mahallati piece. I had to do that, our new Production editors had to do that. I believe it builds character. As soon as you announce to the Production room that you’re doing a fact read on one of those two topics, everyone will just give a groan of sympathy, because they’ve also had to do that. I think the camaraderie around doing difficult fact reads is what kept me going when I was stuck having to comb through pages and pages of legal documents, or City Council notes, or the directives of what birth control Catholic hospitals can provide. Fact reads are not my favorite thing in the entire world, but because they were nobody’s favorite thing, it was always a very supportive environment when someone had to do a tough fact read.

How has working at the Review clarified your future plans?

I really would like to pursue something in the editing field. Something that’s frustrating is that so many job postings are looking for a combined writer/editor, and those are two completely different skills. I don’t want to do the writing part — I just want to take apart other people’s writing, because it brings me pleasure and joy.

It’s been really nice working at the Review and having my fellow Production editors affirm my editing skill. I do take it as a compliment when you have handed me the tough pieces to edit and fact-check, as much as it pained me to do them, because that meant that you trusted my judgment, and you trusted that I would be thorough and committed to doing a good job. I think getting that affirmation of my editing work ethic was really positive in helping me picture a future of doing this for a career.

My last question is, how did you make the crossword? I have no idea how you made the crossword.

See, I also don’t know how to make a crossword. I know how to make other people’s crossword clues better. I took that upon myself because I had clever little quips to share with the world at large, and needed to put them into action. But, yeah, making a crossword, it’s a mental puzzle to just arrange the words together so they’ll fit. You have to rotate the words in your mind — your little crossword mind palace.