糖心vlog蜜桃

About Sumaiya: I grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, along with my two sisters. Unfortunately, at a very young age, I lost my father, and my mother became not only the foundation of our family but also my first mentor and lifelong role model. She taught me to be curious and resilient and instilled the values that have shaped me into the person I am today. With her support, my curiosity led me to pursue my undergraduate degree in Environmental Science at University of Dhaka. This experience laid the foundation for my interest in understanding how environmental factors can affect living organisms at different scales. To deepen my knowledge and explore these connections more broadly, I moved to Germany to pursue a master鈥檚 degree in Ecotoxicology. My academic journey began with a strong focus on environmental science, but over time, my interests evolved toward the biological processes underlying environmental challenges. This curiosity has led me to pursue a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences under the mentorship of Dr. Lisa Petrella, where I continue to expand my understanding of biology while building on the environmental perspective that has shaped my academic path. Outside of thinking about science, I enjoy reading books, cooking, and traveling. These interests give me opportunities to explore new perspectives, connect with different cultures, and maintain a balance outside my academic life.

Scholarship: My research broadly focuses on understanding how rising temperatures affect female fertility. Infertility affects one in every six couples worldwide, and poor germ cell quality is considered a major contributing factor. Several studies show that disrupted regulation of germ cell components, including mRNAs, small RNAs, and germ granules, leads to poor germ cell quality, and rising temperatures can exacerbate these effects. In my dissertation, I am focusing on germ granules and investigating how heat stress can trigger changes in their intrinsic properties, which may lead to sterility. Throughout my work, I have identified one signaling pathway that regulates the intrinsic properties of germ granules under heat stress. These findings provide insight into how germ granules are being regulated and their role in maintaining fertility, which could eventually help identify new therapeutic strategies to maintain high germ cell quality and prevent infertility.

Leadership: To me, leadership is a collaborative effort that thrives on empowering others, fostering collaboration, and uplifting underrepresented voices. I believe strong leaders create environments where others feel seen, supported, and capable of achieving more than they thought possible. At Marquette, my leadership journey began in the classroom and laboratory. As a Graduate Teaching and Research Assistant, I have mentored several undergraduate students, and my teaching philosophy is to help students build confidence as independent thinkers and learners. I always try to maintain a stimulating educational environment, both in class and in the lab, where students can freely share ideas, ask questions, collaborate with one another, take on challenges, and overcome them.

Beyond teaching, I have taken on broader leadership roles that impact the entire graduate community at Marquette, aiming to uplift underrepresented voices and advocate for community needs. I serve as President of the Graduate Student Organization (GSO), where I advocate for graduate students鈥� academic, professional, and personal needs. This role has challenged me to think beyond individual experiences and consider the collective well-being of a diverse community. Under my leadership, we launched several initiatives, including departmental town halls and anonymous communication forms, to strengthen communication between the graduate student body and the university. Feedback from these channels helped bring some tangible changes, including scientific writing support, dedicated writing space, wellness programs, leave processes, and grievance policies. 

Outside of my teaching and advocacy role, I am heavily involved with outreach and community engagement. I have designed and led various outreach events for middle-school girls from underfunded communities to encourage their curiosity and interest in STEM. I also serve as a pen pal through Letter to Pre-Scientist, connecting with middle schoolers and helping them see science as an accessible, rewarding, and stimulating field. 

Across these experiences, I learned that leadership is not about authority, but about empowerment, collaboration, and creating environments where others can thrive. I aim to lead with integrity, empathy, and a commitment to ensuring that all students feel valued and heard.

About Kaley: Like many others graduate students, I have always experienced a natural curiosity about the world around me. More specifically, a desire to understand people based on the observations of those around me. What makes them tick? What drives their decision-making? How can some people experience adversity and bounce back while others experience significant, lasting distress, and others demonstrate immense growth and thriving? And, more importantly, how can we set people on a path of recovery versus suffering? Not until I took an undergraduate psychology class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, did I realize there was an entire field dedicated to answering those questions. I quickly understood that becoming a clinical psychologist would align with my personal values of curiosity and compassion while also contributing meaningfully to society. In pursuit of this career, I completed a post-baccalaureate research position and a master鈥檚 in clinical research methods before finally landing in my current doctoral program. 

Scholarship: Trauma exposure is highly prevalent, affecting nearly 90% of adults, and PTSD imposes substantial societal and economic costs. Yet current treatments remain insufficient for many individuals. My program of research addresses this gap by harnessing affective neuroscience to better characterize both vulnerability and resilience mechanisms. A facet of resilience is post-traumatic growth, which is a phenomenon of positive psychological outcomes that may arise from trauma-related distress. My dissertation investigates the relationship between post-traumatic growth in the aftermath of trauma, and emotion processing in trauma-exposed individuals. Building on my first-authored systematic review assessing the incidence of post-traumatic growth in traumatic injury survivors (Davis et al., 2026, Traumatology), I am empirically testing whether enhanced processing of emotional facial expressions relates to post-traumatic growth in a community sample of trauma survivors.

The aim of this program of research is to improve the identification of who may be at greatest risk for psychopathology following trauma and inform the development of novel interventions in the aftermath of trauma-exposure to decrease the risk of psychopathology and promote resilience and thriving.

Leadership: Throughout my graduate school career, I have strategically sought leadership opportunities at local, regional, and national service-related organizations in the field of psychology and science. In 2025, I served as Chair of the American Psychological Association Graduate Student (APAGS) Science Committee, where I advocated for science-minded graduate students to promote the highest quality of training for future psychologists and researchers, particularly those from underrepresented and marginalized groups. I have also served as President of the Graduate Women in Science-Milwaukee Chapter organization (June 2024-25), an organization dedicated to promoting the presence of women in STEM and was the Psychology Student Representative of the 糖心vlog蜜桃 Graduate Student Organization (2025). Since 2021, I have served as a member of the Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP) Education Committee Trainee Subcommittee since 2021, where I advocate for research trainees in the biological sciences. Finally, I have served on the Science Communications Committee for SOBP since 2023. The aim of this committee is to improve the communication of scientific material published in academic peer-reviewed research journals to lay audiences. These experiences have underscored the importance of developing leadership skills during graduate school, and I believe wholeheartedly that each graduate student should feel empowered to seek such positions. Thus, I am looking forward to being a Schmitt Fellow for the present academic year where I may continue to hone these leadership skills to directly impact graduate students at 糖心vlog蜜桃.

About Shamudra: I grew up in Sylhet, Bangladesh, in a close-knit family where faith and education mattered more than anything we owned. I lost my father when I was a child, and growing up without him taught me resilience and purpose in life. My mother, a homemaker with a quiet love of science, kept my curiosity alive. She was the first person to make me wonder how science and engineering might help people live healthier lives. At Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Bangladesh, I studied mechanical engineering and wrote my undergraduate thesis on the mathematical modeling of blood flow through arterial plaques and bypass grafts. It was the first time I saw a computer simulation reveal something hidden inside the human body, and I was hooked. I graduated in 2020 and began working as a process engineer at an optics manufacturer, just as the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to ask how tiny virus-laden droplets travel through the air and into our lungs. That question led me to the United States and to the joint Biomedical Engineering Ph.D. program at 糖心vlog蜜桃 and the Medical College of Wisconsin in 2021. When I'm not in the lab, I'm usually behind a camera, planning our next trip, or cooking the Bangladeshi dishes that remind me of home.

Scholarship: Millions of people use nasal sprays and inhalers every day to treat respiratory diseases, but much of the medicine never reaches its intended therapeutic target. In Dr. Guilherme Garcia's Airway Biomechanics Lab, as a Ph.D. candidate, I develop computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelsto simulate how medicine moves through realistic airway geometries built from patients' CT and MRI scans. I then validate these predictions with experiments on 3D-printed nasal replicas. My first project, born from the pandemic, measured ways to reduce the spread of aerosols in dental clinics. Since then, my work has examined why steroid inhalers can cause voice problems, and how particle size and breathing technique affect inhaler treatment for laryngopharyngeal reflux, a condition in which stomach acid reaches the throat. I also developed a new wall-film modeling approach that predicts nasal spray deposition 50% more accurately. This work has been published in leading journals, including the Journal of Aerosol Science and Experimental and Computational Multiphase Flow. It has also been recognized with Marquette's Outstanding Research Assistant of the Year Award and a Best Abstract Award at the 2026 AAPS PharmSci 360, a leading pharmaceutical science conference in the United States. Beyond my Ph.D. research, I have interned at two of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies including Merck & Co., Inc and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. There, I helped model the large-scale bioreactors that produce critical biologic medicines, supporting teams as they scaled production from benchtop to manufacturing size so these therapies can reach patients sooner. My goal is to make computer modeling a trusted tool in drug development and regulation, so that safe, affordable medicines reach the people who need them. I hope to pursue that goal as a scientific leader at a leading pharmaceutical company.

Leadership: To me, leadership means building bridges between people who see a problem differently. My work sits between engineers and physicians, and between academic research and pharmaceutical drug development, so much of my job is translation: turning simulations into answers others can act on. At Marquette, I was elected Communications Representative on the Graduate Student Organization's Executive Committee and served as a student representative on the Graduate School's stipend workgroup. By listening to fellow graduate students and bringing their concerns to university leaders, we helped secure stipend increases. The experience taught me that lasting change comes from consensus-building, not from the loudest voice in the room. I also enjoy investing in the next generation of scholars. As a teaching assistant, I taught programming and led biomechanics design labs, and I was nominated for the Graduate Student Teaching Excellence Award. I have served as a judge for research posters at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Summer Biomechanics, Bioengineering, and Biotransport Conference

(SB3C) and reviewed abstracts and manuscripts for several national conferences (ASME SB3C, BMES Annual Meeting, and AAPS PharmSci 360) and leading scientific journals, always aiming to give the kind of encouraging peer-feedback that continues to help me grow. Going forward, I hope to mentor students from backgrounds like mine and show them that curiosity and perseverance can take them far, just as they carried me from Sylhet to Milwaukee.

About Omar: I grew up in Cairo, Egypt, and ever since I was a small boy, I have been fascinated by computers and technology and loved exploring how they work. I still remember assembling and maintaining computers by myself, long before I knew it could become a career. That curiosity carried me through training in embedded systems, communications, and signal processing, and then into industry research and development at Fraunhofer IOSB and Fraunhofer IDMT. Working in applied research taught me how good engineering is built: in teams, under real constraints, for people who will actually use it.

Over time, I wanted my work to touch human health more directly. In industry, I watched machine learning transform how we analyzed images and sound, and I kept asking what the same tools could do for medicine. That pull brought me to Marquette, where I could apply everything I had learned about signals and machine learning to one of the hardest imaging problems in neuroscience.

Today I live in Milwaukee with my spouse and our children. Most mornings begin with the school run, which keeps the Ph.D. in perspective: research is demanding, but family is the reason it matters. Outside the lab, I enjoy staying active, learning about cybersecurity and networking, and exploring new topics. I usually spend weekends with my family and friends.

Scholarship: I am a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering, working with my advisor and a team of clinical collaborators. My dissertation studies functional connectivity between the brain and the cervical spinal cord using fMRI. Neuroscience has mapped the brain in remarkable detail, but the spinal cord, the pathway that carries every movement and sensation, remains far harder to image. It is thin, surrounded by bone and pulsing fluid, and its signal is easily buried under breathing and heartbeat noise. Those are, at heart, signal processing problems, and that is where my background lets me contribute.

My work develops computational methods to recover reliable signals from the spinal cord and to measure how activity there relates to activity in the brain. I draw on computer vision, medical image analysis, and representation learning to map how activity in specific brain regions is coupled with activity in specific segments of the cervical spinal cord. I collaborate closely with clinicians, which keeps the research grounded in questions that matter for patients. Across my graduate and industry work, I have authored more than ten peer-reviewed publications.

I hope this research helps lay the groundwork for imaging biomarkers in conditions that affect the brain鈥搒pinal cord pathway, such as spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, and degenerative cervical myelopathy. After completing my Ph.D. in May 2027, I aim to work as a research scientist at the intersection of machine learning and medical imaging, translating methods like these into tools clinicians can use.

Leadership: I believe leadership is the work of building the conditions in which others can do their best work. My clearest expression of this at Marquette is the Ph.D. student club I lead in our department. I took on that role to give students a reason to connect beyond their own labs. Doctoral study can be isolating, especially for international students and those balancing family responsibilities. Through the club, I organize research talks, technical workshops, conferences, poster presentations, and social gatherings, creating a space where students across labs share problems, ideas, and support. Our events regularly draw 20 to 30 students, and several cross-lab collaborations began in those conversations.

Before graduate school, I learned leadership in applied research teams at Fraunhofer, where projects succeeded only when engineers, domain experts, and clients understood one another. At Fraunhofer, I led technical work packages on joint projects. I bring the same habit to my research today, translating between engineering and medicine in my collaborations with clinicians, so that our methods answer questions physicians actually ask.

I also lead through mentoring. In my lab, I have mentored undergraduate and junior Ph.D. researchers in machine learning, and I serve as a peer reviewer for medical imaging journals. As a parent and a doctoral student, I have learned that leadership is less about having every answer and more about showing up consistently, being honest about what I don't know, and making room for others to grow. The Schmitt Fellowship gives me the chance to extend that work across the Graduate School.

About Shamiha: I am from Bangladesh and spent most of my life in Dhaka. I have always been fascinated by how much information can be hidden inside a signal that, at first, looks like noise. That curiosity drew me to Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Dhaka and eventually brought me to 糖心vlog蜜桃 for my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

My path into research started quite literally with a stethoscope and a microphone, listening for patterns in breath sounds that the human ear alone might miss. It was a small project, but it changed the way I thought about engineering. A waveform was no longer just a waveform. There was a person on the other side of it, and something useful could come from learning how to listen to the data carefully.

That idea has stayed with me as my research has moved from biomedical signals to machine learning, language, and eventually brain activity.

Moving to Milwaukee for graduate school was another important transition in my life. It was my first time living far from my family, and I had to build a community and support system from scratch. It made me appreciate how much small things matter when someone is new: having a person to ask, being invited into a conversation, or simply feeling that you do not have to figure everything out alone. That experience continues to shape how I work with students, collaborators, and other graduate students.

Outside of research, I enjoy painting, reading fiction, finding visual ways to explain complicated ideas, taking long walks, and spending time with friends. I think both art and engineering appeal to the same part of me: taking something complicated and trying to see the structure inside it.

Scholarship: The question that has followed me through most of my research is simple: how can we extract useful meaning from information that is noisy, incomplete, or difficult to interpret?

Over the years, the signal itself has changed. I began with respiratory sounds and later worked on breast cancer prediction and student-success modeling. During my Ph.D., my research moved toward language technologies for people with aphasia, a language disorder commonly caused by stroke or brain injury. I developed language models for aphasic speech, including sentence-completion and question-answering systems, and later expanded this work to multimodal models that combine language with acoustic information.

My current work takes that question one step closer to the brain. I study whether noninvasive EEG signals can be connected to sentence meaning and communication intent. Instead of asking a model to jump directly from brain activity to a complete sentence, I am interested in recovering an intermediate representation of meaning that we can inspect, evaluate, and eventually use to support communication.

This also raises questions that I find just as interesting as model accuracy. Does the model work for a new person? Is it learning meaningful neural information or an unintended shortcut? Can we understand why it made a prediction? Can it recognize when it is uncertain?

Ultimately, I want to develop neural and language technologies that are technically strong but also honest about what they know and what they do not. For assistive communication, that distinction matters.

Leadership: I learned a lot about leadership through research before I ever held a leadership title. As the lead and first author on several of my projects, I have had to take a question that was still somewhat uncertain, turn it into a workable study, organize experiments and analyses, coordinate with collaborators, and keep the project moving when the results did not behave the way I expected. I discovered that I enjoy that responsibility. Research leadership, for me, is partly about ideas, but just as much about creating enough structure for those ideas to become something real.

Teaching has taught me a different side of leadership. I have served as a teaching assistant for more than ten courses at Marquette, and some of my most meaningful moments have happened during ordinary office hours. A student comes in convinced that they are simply 鈥渘ot good at this,鈥� we work through the problem together, and eventually that changes into, 鈥淚 think I can try the next part.鈥� Receiving the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award in 2025 was meaningful to me because it recognized this quieter, everyday part of teaching.

I have also served as president of the EECE Ph.D. Club, helping organize research talks, poster sessions, and opportunities for students from different labs to connect. I enjoy mentoring younger researchers and helping new and international students navigate graduate school, partly because I remember how many things I had to figure out when I first arrived.

Over time, I have come to think of leadership less as being the person at the front of the room and more as taking responsibility for what happens in the room. Sometimes that means giving direction, sometimes it means asking the right question, and sometimes it means making space for someone else to speak. As a Schmitt Fellow, I hope to keep developing that kind of leadership and carry it into the researcher, mentor, and colleague I want to become.

About Mobina: I grew up in Isfahan, Iran, where my curiosity and passion for learning were shaped by my parents, who taught me the value of education, perseverance, and service to others. My interest in problem-solving and understanding real-world phenomena led me to pursue a bachelor's degree in Statistics. During my undergraduate studies, I discovered my passion for applying statistical methods to practical challenges, which led me to a career in data analytics. I progressed from a data analyst to a supervisory role, where I led projects combining statistics, machine learning, and business intelligence. These experiences inspired me to pursue graduate studies at 糖心vlog蜜桃, where I could further explore the connection between statistical theory and real-world applications.

Scholarship: My doctoral research focuses on developing statistical and deep learning methods for analyzing complex hybrid data, which combine different types of information, such as time-dependent measurements and individual characteristics. My research integrates dimension reduction, functional data analysis, and deep learning to uncover meaningful patterns, improve predictions, and enhance the interpretation of complex datasets. By bridging classical statistical methods with modern machine learning techniques, this work seeks to develop interpretable and accessible tools for addressing real-world challenges in healthcare, environmental monitoring, and other interdisciplinary fields. The broader goal of my research is to advance statistical methodologies that enable researchers across disciplines to gain deeper insights from complex data and make more informed decisions.

Leadership: Leadership has been an important part of my academic and professional journey. As an undergraduate, I founded the Entrepreneurship Society and served as Deputy Secretary of the Scientific Association of Data Science and Statistics. In industry, I progressed to a supervisory role, leading data-driven projects and collaborating with multidisciplinary teams.

At Marquette, I have served as an instructor and teaching assistant, guiding students in developing their statistical knowledge and confidence in problem-solving and coding. My commitment to teaching and student success was recognized with the 2025 Best Teaching Assistant Award. I enjoy working with others, sharing knowledge, and helping people grow through collaboration and mentorship.

About Kate: I have lived in the greater Milwaukee area my whole life, and currently reside in Bay View with my two children, my partner, two cats, a dog, and a very sassy rabbit, all of whom keep me quite busy. The birth of my first child in 2014 helped me realize the career path I had been on for 10-plus years was not what I was called to do, and I used the opportunity of being a stay-at-home-mom to earn my master's in English literature online, focusing on graphic novels. When my children began school, I continued with my PhD.  When I am upset, overwhelmed, or otherwise need to escape from reality for an hour or two, I turn to fanfiction鈥攂oth writing and reading. I have been writing fanfiction since well before I was familiar with the term; my middle-school friends and I filled dozens of notebooks with hand-written, self-insert Star Trek stories, creating our own spaceships and characters to inhabit the Star Trek universe. I am thankful that this was pre-internet, and that these handwritten stories did not survive through the years, as I am sure they would be extremely embarrassing to read now. Still, the memory of these stories reminds me to be extra kind when providing feedback to younger members of the fanfiction communities I belong to. I think fanfiction is a useful tool for developing writers, facilitating the expression and processing of challenging emotions, and acting as a catalyst for community. In addition to serving as a mentor in my own fan communities鈥攖hrough beta reading, helping with plot questions, and serving as a sensitivity reader for characters with visual impairments鈥擨 also volunteer for the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit that holds the mission of 鈥渟erving fans by preserving and encouraging transformative fan activity.鈥�

Scholarship: My main area of focus is fan studies, which means I study both the things that people are fans of and the fans themselves. Fandom is a concept that is often minimized or even mocked. People who engage with their fandoms 鈥渢oo much鈥� or in the 鈥渨rong ways鈥� are seen as lacking social skills or being obsessed 鈥渇anatics.鈥� While much of the fan studies field is focused on overcoming these stereotypes, this work is mostly done through academic texts that are unapproachable or inaccessible to people outside of the field. For these reasons, I intentionally tailor my research for both academic and non-academic audiences. One example of this is Affirmation/Transformation: Fandom Created, an exhibition which was on display at Marquette's Haggerty Museum of Art from August 23rd-December 21st, 2024, and which used fine art pieces from the Haggerty鈥檚 collection to speak on the kinds of things that fans create and what those fans get in return for their creative activity. These fine art pieces were accompanied by fanworks, inspired by said fine art, and created and submitted by fans from around the world. 

Leadership: My goal as a leader is to support community and collaboration. In addition to making my work approachable, my project brought together multiple campus departments, including the English Department, Graduate School, Haggerty Museum of Art, Raynor Library, and the Institutional Repository. Collaboration is extremely important to leadership; it is not about knowing and doing everything yourself. Instead, a leader articulates a vision in a way that allows others to help achieve it. Another major factor of leadership is the courage to take risks and try new things. Using an art exhibition as the foundation of an English dissertation is something that has not been done before.  

My interest in public facing humanities is an extension of my drive to be of service to my communities. In our current sociohistorical moment, the value of the humanities has diminished in the public eye. This makes it even more important to present information in a way that connects people to it鈥攕howing how and why the information is of value and encouraging further engagement. Likewise, my volunteer work at the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) stems from the desire to be of service to a community that uplifts me and many others. On Marquette campus, I work to be of service to the community through my engagement with various groups and organizations. Currently, I serve as President of the Association of English Graduate Students (AEGS), where I have taken up the call to foster spaces for community and rest.

About Ashan: I am from Mawanella, Sri Lanka, where I grew up in a close family with my parents, siblings, and the love and support of my grandparents. My father served as an officer in the Sri Lankan Air Force, and my mother is a homemaker. Growing up, my mother taught me the importance of staying united as a family and supporting one another, while my father taught me discipline, courage, and responsibility. My father has been one of the greatest influences in my life. I grew up during the period of the civil war in Sri Lanka, and I still remember the sacrifices he made and the way he worked to protect and provide for our family while serving his country. His dedication and strength have had a lasting influence on the person I am today. I attended Kingswood College in Kandy, where I developed an interest in chemistry while also being involved in sports and extracurricular activities. I later entered the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, and completed a B.Sc. Special Degree in Chemistry. My interest in chemistry became much stronger during my undergraduate studies, particularly after realizing that physical chemistry was one of my strongest subjects. More importantly, I discovered that I enjoyed research and wanted to build a career around asking scientific questions and finding solutions to real-world problems. This motivated me to come to the United States to pursue my Ph.D. at 糖心vlog蜜桃. Outside of research, I enjoy cricket, baseball, fitness, traveling, and spending time with my wife and friends. Looking back at my journey from Mawanella to Marquette, I am proud of how far I have come and of the experiences that have shaped me along the way.

Scholarship: My doctoral research focuses on developing new approaches to destroy per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a large class of highly persistent human-made chemicals. PFAS can move through water, soil, and the environment and can eventually enter the food chain. Their strong carbon鈥揻luorine bonds make them extremely difficult to break down, and exposure to certain PFAS has been associated with several adverse health effects, including increased risks of certain cancers. These challenges motivated me to investigate whether we could develop milder and more effective chemical approaches to break these strong bonds. In my research, I use photocatalysis to activate and break C鈥揊 bonds under visible light. Our work has successfully demonstrated the defluorination of perfluorocarboxylic acids (PFCAs), an important class of PFAS, using transition-metal photocatalysis under mild reaction conditions. One aspect of this work that excites me is the use of lower-energy visible light rather than relying primarily on higher-energy UV irradiation. To the best of our knowledge, our work provides the first example of using homogeneous transition-metal photocatalysis under visible light for the defluorination of PFCAs. We are now building on these findings by investigating earth-abundant transition metals as photocatalysts, with the goal of making chemistry more accessible, practical, and sustainable.

I am particularly proud that this project has allowed me to present my research at national and regional scientific conferences and communicate our findings with the broader chemistry community. I have presented this work at two national and two regional conferences, with additional presentations planned during this academic year. I have also received three university travel awards that have supported my participation in scientific conferences. A manuscript based on this research has been submitted to an ACS journal, and I hope to continue publishing the extensions of this work. Ultimately, my goal is to develop environmentally responsible and practical approaches for breaking down persistent, fluorinated compounds and to continue teaching and conducting research in academia.

Leadership: My understanding of leadership has developed through sports, teaching, research, and professional experiences. I was involved in scouting and athletics during school, and later baseball became an important part of my university life. At the University of Kelaniya, I earned university colors throughout my baseball career and served as Vice-Captain of the team during my final year. I trained younger players, organized motivational and support sessions, and worked with the national baseball pitching coach to establish a women's baseball team at the university. As a pitcher, I learned the importance of endurance, discipline, and teamwork, and that team success matters more than individual performance.

My leadership continued through teaching and professional experiences. After completing my undergraduate degree, I worked as a chemist in Sri Lanka, where I helped develop a new production method during the country's economic crisis. I also worked as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Kelaniya and later at 糖心vlog蜜桃, teaching students in general and organic chemistry. In 2024, my department nominated me for 糖心vlog蜜桃's Teaching Assistant Excellence Award. In research, I have mentored a graduate student and currently mentor undergraduate researchers.

For me, being a good leader means making effective decisions at the right time while supporting others and working toward a common goal. Through the Arthur J. Schmitt Leadership Fellowship, I hope to further strengthen my leadership and communication skills, particularly my ability to communicate effectively in English, as I prepare for a career in teaching and research.