Vital Wisdom: 15 Life Lessons Inspired by the Nursing Journey

I really started to enjoy writing with ChatGPT, playing with voice construction and giving the LLM liberties to expand on teh frameworks of stories that I give skeletons for. After a lot of iteration of getting the right kind of output, I am excited to say that I 50/50 wrote a short book with a robot, whose stories were powerful and moving enough to bring tears to my grandmother's eyes. The author is Clara Fitzwater, which is an anagram for 'Artificial Writer'. To be able to lay an industry-specific framework around commonly engaging human storylines was a fun project, considering I've never been a nurse before. It also demonstrates how similar we all are in what we consider a fulfilling narrative arc, regardless of what the actual topic is.

Lessons Learned: 

This one was just a one-off to see how emotional ChatGod could be in writing and to test the narrative capabiliies and how much I would have to tweak. Also, I'm not sure if it learned about my writing style as I went, but it definitely felt like it did. The end chapters felt exactly like something I would write anyways. Maybe that's due to prompting choices (I was very descriptive). Originally I wanted to create these for every sticky market (people who are defined by their occupation and take pride in these niche knowledge books- cops, teachers, nurses, etc) but I again realized that I hate the marketing side. Overall a success of getting it out, a failure of the continued goal, but I walked away afterwards after losing momentum.

Van Heron Labs- Co-Founder 

With my partner, Founder and CEO Dr. Rebecca Vaught, we started this company as an idea that was run through Enventure's incubator program BioVentures. Halfway through, the pandemic hit and we were isolated to our homes. So we took decades-old equipment, rigged up a sterilization area, and created a home lab in my living room. That lab let us get the first pieces of data, launching us into the full scale lab at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. We are currently revenue-sustained without any funding, operate in several verticals, and have plans to expand our work into human optimization soon. Van Heron Labs focuses on algorithmically analyzing organic systems, determining the optimal nutrient environment to cut out unnecessary metabolic steps, conserve energy, and maximize several crucial metrics (growth, recombinant production, cell health, etc.).

Enventure- Executive Director

Enventure is a non-profit organization dedicated to connecting professional students to the field of life sciences. Working my way up from the bottom, I was able to participate in/organize every program that Enventure has to offer, including VICE: a case study competition, ENRICH: consulting for established life science companies, Diligence Academy: offering due diligence services for local family offices, and several other programs and events. As Executive Director, I was also able to oversee the institution of new policies, programs, and protocols for the organization. Building this community of young entrepreneurs with the most engaged, fun pool of innovators I've ever met set off my entrepreneurship dreams.

Seeing Inside/Self-Actualized Goals- Author

These are personal writings of mine, dedicated to understanding self, appreciating others, and achieving goals. I was raised in an extremely turbulent environment, and grew to have a lot of emotions that I did not understand. As I worked hard to find the words over the course of a decade, the book Seeing Inside is a letter to my younger self, full of the brief but concise introductions to concepts that I had no terminology for. Seeing Inside led me to act as a consultant for the City of Houston, as they worked with UNICEF to introduce the Child Friendly Cities Initiative. Self-Actualized Goals dictates my framework for achieving my personal goals, working to get to the root of the impedement, using introspection to overcome both internal and external barriers.

Lessons Learned:

This is my most genuine work, a work borne to reach out to my younger self. It is a success in that regard. I reached out to two psychologists to get their thoughts and both gave very positive feedback, so maybe it will have some impact in the world one of these days. But even if it doesn't, I am glad it was created. It is a landmark in my life that signals a turning point and an accomplishment of virtue.

Cult Morgan-Founder

I love the entire concept of web3. There's a depth of freedom and creativity in the very ethos of web3, and being involved at this time feels like no one knows where the boundaries are, so there is endless room to be wild in the expanse. I started playing around with the artificial intelligence DALL-E, learning how to generate images that I loved. I've also created and owned several NFTs in the past, and was bored with the idea that I had to pull out an app to show someone my collection. Throw in a love of working with my hands, stir up the pot, praise OpenAI for allowing commercialization of DALL-E, and Cult Morgan was born. This is just a little project purely to have fun with, to let my unabashed style and creativity flow, and to make something tangible. 

Lessons Learned: 

I do not like distributing general products to wide audiences. I like targeted problems, focused solutions, and clearly identified customers. General marketing through blasting ads is an art, and an incredible amount of work, and something that I did not want to put the effort into learning and doing. I got a bit through SEO and realized that people can only get deep in so many skill sets, and that this category was not something I was inspired to have in my skillset. I genuinely enjoyed creating images using DALL-E that fit my style, but this is not something I would probably connect to a broader community through, it's too unfocused. And really, what I want out of many of my projects is connection through community anyways.

Artique-Founder

Sticking with the web3 interest, I wanted a way to express my love of art but specifically involve NFTs. I created Artique (Art Critique) as a way to just free-flow with language in a way that is in no way conducive to normal conversation. Language can be so fun, and the freedom to wax poetic over a piece of art is a romantic experience that lets the audience emotionally connect to the composition. Choosing the right word to really encapsulate the spirit of the work scratches an itch in my soul that is just really fun to play around with.

Lessons Learned:

Man, I really like using flowery language. The waxing and waning and not having to hold back when appreciating a piece. There is such a thing as looking too deeply, but there is also something to the journey of the deep dive that is a creative endeavour in itself. It is less about the piece and more about my exploration and looping journey around the piece. Art critiquing is about inspiration and evocation, not about being correct. 

Working People-Founder

As is probably very clear by now, I really enjoy interviewing people. I love the act of being supportive of another human through simple appreciation of their work and a platform on which to display it. As individuals, we spend so much time and energy at our jobs that they come to define a portion of our personality and lived experience. WorkingPeople is a space for people to show others facets of their work, as seen through their own eyes. Heavily inspired by People of New York, WorkingPeople tries to share stories that aren't normally noticed or appreciated by those on the other side of the counter. 

Clutch City Science- Founder

Clutch City Science began as a way to practice my science communication skills. I wanted to learn how to take complicated science and explain it in a way that my grandmother would understand. I think that comprehension is the only thing keeping the general population from being excited about science, and I wanted the people of Houston to be proud and supportive of the incredible research happening right in their own city. Houston had been known as an oil and gas town, but by being more aware of the impact and the sheer amount of Houston research happening, that the Houston identity itself would begin to shift, truly becoming what Mayor Sylvester Turner calls "The Third Coast of Science".

Incorporating Science- Host

At my core, I am a people person. Conversation is a dance, where the participants take turns leading, supporting, and introducing elements of style. The conversations that i hosted (several interviews were hosted by Kedar Karkare) were all unscripted, as I preferred to let the flow of the conversation be dictated by genuine reactions and the curiousity of the moment. I was able to discuss science as I talked to biotech CEOs, artists, and local KOL's, through the lens of a human-first approach. Through this medium, I was able to learn how to structure talks off-the-cuff to build into a proper narrative, to edit audio, and to source interviewees. The pandemic swept in and cut off in-person meetings, which was my preference, so I let the project die.

In a nutshell, my PhD work revolved around: 

Protein homeostasis, stress response networks, and the precursors for neurodegenerative disease.

My first-author work has been published by JBC and I performed every single experiment in the paper, wrote the article, performed all analysis, and did every edit. In the meantime, the paper can be found here:

https://www.jbc.org/article/S0021-9258(22)00867-5/fulltext

The abstract is as follows:

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s diseases affect millions of Americans every year. One factor linked to formation of aggregates associated with these diseases is damage sustained to proteins by oxidative stress. Management of protein misfolding by the ubiquitous Hsp70 chaperone family can be modulated by modification of two key cysteines in the ATPase domain by oxidizing or thiol-modifying compounds. To investigate the biological consequences of cysteine modification on the Hsp70 Ssa1 in budding yeast, we generated cysteine null (cysteine to serine) and oxidomimetic (cysteine to aspartic acid) mutant variants of both C264 and C303 and demonstrate reduced ATP binding, hydrolysis, and protein folding properties in both the oxidomimetic and hydrogen peroxide-treated Ssa1. In contrast, cysteine nullification rendered Ssa1 insensitive to oxidative inhibition. Additionally, we determined the oxidomimetic ssa1-2CD (C264D, C303D) allele was unable to function as the sole Ssa1 isoform in yeast cells and also exhibited dominant negative effects on cell growth and viability. Ssa1 binds to and represses Hsf1, the major transcription factor controlling the heat shock response, and we found the oxidomimetic Ssa1 failed to stably interact with Hsf1, resulting in constitutive activation of the heat shock response. Consistent with our in vitro findings, ssa1-2CD cells were compromised for de novo folding, post-stress protein refolding, and in regulated degradation of a model terminally misfolded protein. Together, these findings pinpoint Hsp70 as a key link between oxidative stress and proteostasis, information critical to understanding cytoprotective systems that prevent and manage cellular insults underlying complex disease states.

-Named to Inicio Ventures "Top 100 Latinx Founders to Watch"

-Won the Dean's Research Award at UTHealth

-Interned at the clinical research organization Proxima

-VC University Scholarship Recipient from UC Berkeley

-SMDP Biotech Scholar

-National Merit Scholar

-CFWC Endowed Scholar

In Defense of the BioRevolution

The BioRevolution is Here