Note: This story is part of an ongoing series profiling graduate students in the School of Life Sciences. See October's featured students here. 

Eboni Elaine Andersun – Biology and Society PhD, History and Philosophy of Science 

When Eboni Andersun was a kid, she dreamed of being a doctor. She drew pictures of all the patients she’d save one day and spent hours obsessively writing “Dr. Andersun” in cursive on her papers.  

“I was a precocious child,” she laughs.  

Throughout her undergraduate degree at ASU, she stayed interested in human health but realized that being a doctor might not be the right path for her: “I didn’t only want to be able to serve people who could see me at my facility, who had the right insurance. I wanted to serve populations.”  

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This especially became clear to Andersun when she took a class on HIV with Damien Salamone, who teaches both the microbiology of the virus, as well as the historical and social impacts, like how HIV disproportionately impacts People of Color. After that, Andersun enrolled in another course where she wrote articles on the history of herpes and gonorrhea for the Embryo Project Encyclopedia. That work made it extra clear how not only HIV, but most sexually transmitted infections, are highly stigmatized and misunderstood to the point where many people don’t know about available preventions and treatments for these overwhelmingly common infections. Black women compared to women of other races are especially susceptible to contracting STIs like HIV, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and others.

“As a Black woman myself, I’m a part of this very vulnerable population. I couldn’t imagine all the women that look like me, that sound me like me, that speak like me, that come from the same place as me, not having the knowledge that I do and being especially vulnerable to these STIs that are preventable, that are treatable, that are sometimes curable. I knew I wanted to fix it.” 

Andersun’s work doing research with the Embryo Project opened doors for her to continue onto her PhD at ASU. She was awarded an Enrichment Fellowship from the School of Life Sciences in her first year, which gave her the freedom to prepare for her dissertation without working as a TA. She spent much of that year working with the ForkHPV! project, which organized a multidisciplinary group of 86 Barrett Honors students to study HPV from different angles and culminated in a university-wide vaccination event.  

Andersun plans to use her PhD to design research-based interventions around preventing or treating STIs for Women of Color in Phoenix. She hasn’t decided which STI she’ll focus on yet, but she knows she wants her project to prioritize the knowledge of local communities in hopes of actually reducing the disparities of disease occurrence. She hopes this will lead her to a career of designing research-based interventions that have real world outcomes with organizations like the Centers for Disease Control or the National Institutes of Health. 

“I want to reduce disparities, and help heal the relationship between researchers and communities, members of the public that have historically been exploited by research, and people that have not benefitted from research in the past. That’s my goal.”  

Andersun surely has an exciting career ahead. But in many ways, even getting to the point of doing a PhD is a dream come true.  

“I’m the first person in my family to even get a bachelor’s degree, so it’s so surreal to be getting a PhD... I’m pursuing my doctor dreams, just in a different way.” 

Andersun also emphasizes the role her mother Elaine played in her journey, who passed away before Andersun finished her bachelor’s. “I know all of this is due to my mother. She’s who I work for, and I see her in every woman I want to serve.” 

Susan Albor –– Microbiology PhD  

Susan Albor spends many of her days at the Desert Botanical Garden, tending to her propagated cottonwood trees that she’s collected from various sites around Arizona. While she’s interested in learning about the cottonwood trees, she’s more interested in the soil they grow in, and the many microbes that live there. In her PhD, she hopes to understand how different soil microbes help cottonwood trees adapt to environmental stressors, especially extreme heat. 

“A lot of people have focused on the relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and plants. Cottonwoods are one of those plants that have important mycorrhizal associations. But there’s been less of an emphasis on other microbes in the soil. I’m hoping to fill that gap.” 

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Albor didn’t start out with a specific passion for soil microbiology; she could’ve been happy with almost any ecological work. Like many biologists, Albor learned to love nature through her childhood experiences outdoors. She became curious about the land that she got to know through family hikes and camping trips in the Midwestern US, but she was also influenced by land that she never got to know: the land that her parents and grandparents called home. 

“I would hear my family talk about their experiences in Mexico, and what it looked like there. Interacting with nature was just part of their everyday experience. And I think I had this longing to know nature the way they did.”  

Albor especially grew attentive to plants through her family: “I think that’s another cultural thing, you know? Your aunts and your mom are always exchanging plants and talking about them and getting really excited when someone has a rare plant. I think that just really increased my appreciation for them.” 

When Albor started her undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois, Chicago, she enrolled as a double major in biology and environmental sciences, dreaming of doing environmental research. She knew to get to that career she’d have to start getting research experience. Unpaid internships weren’t an option for her, though; to pay for school, she was always working on the side. But one day, the perfect job came along: a student worker position in the university greenhouse.  

“It felt like my dream job. And like a step in the right direction, like something that would get me to where I needed to be.” 

With the connections she made at the greenhouse, Albor got deeper into biology research. She spent the next summer working at the University’s experimental plot of native tallgrass prairie, researching the relationship between monarchs and milkweed. The year after that, she got accepted into the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program doing soil microbiology research. That experience made her not only curious about plants, but about the soil they grew in.  

Albor was awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, one of the most prestigious graduate student research fellowships, to pursue her PhD at ASU studying soil microbiology. It’s been a winding road so far, as she’s been looking for the right spaces and people to work with to do the research she wants. She’s landed somewhere interdisciplinary, designing her own experiments to try and bring soil microbiology and botany together –– a route that not every PhD student takes, which can be both exciting and frightening.  

Albor speaks more candidly than most about the uncertainties that come with doing a PhD. She’s honest about not being sure what the path ahead is. Even so, one thing is clear: she’s already an environmental researcher. Every day that she works with her soil samples and propagated cottonwoods, she learns more about the land she lives on and the many species –– visible and invisible –– that she shares it with, which is what she’s been working for all along. 

Note: This story is part of an ongoing series profiling graduate students in the School of Life Sciences. See April's featured students here. 

Gissel Marquez Alcaraz – Evolutionary Biology 

What do cancer, cacti, and kombucha have in common?  

For Gissel Marquez Alcaraz, a third year PhD candidate in the Evolutionary Biology program, they’re all model systems for studying evolution. 

Marquez Alcaraz has been interested in studying cancer since she was an undergraduate. She read Athena Aktipis, a psychologist at ASU, speaking about adaptive therapy during an interview. Rather than attempting to eradicate cancer cells, adaptive therapy seeks to control tumors to keep them from spreading, which could prolong the lives of people who have cancer.  

“It was this idea of possibly controlling cancer and allowing people to live with it. That’s what initially led me to reach out to [Aktipis],” Marquez Alcaraz explains. “And [Aktipis] told me, ‘I actually don't have a cancer lab right now. But I have space in my kombucha lab. If you do the kombucha work now, maybe you can do the cancer work later.’” 

So, throughout her bachelor’s, Marquez Alcaraz worked for and eventually ran the kombucha project in the Cooperation lab, studying how yeast and bacteria in kombucha cooperate and compete, as well as how the system evolves in response to disturbances. When she started her PhD, she finally got the chance to start researching cancer, too. 

After joining the Cancer and Evolution lab, Marquez Alcaraz followed her curiosities. She began investigating cancer in saguaro cacti, which, when infected, start branching out in alien-looking crests and folds. 

“I see (cancer in cacti) as more of a metaphor. If I can tell people a cactus has cancer, and it lived for 200 years, and it was probably one of the most iconic things in the hiking trail for years and years, maybe people can be inspired by that.” 

But Marquez Alcaraz mostly focuses on developing treatments for humans. She both looks at whether certain types of probiotics can help improve cancer treatment outcomes and tests adaptive therapy techniques in mice models, all with the hope of improving the lives of people who have cancer. She also co-directs the ACE scholars' program, which employs over 60 undergraduate researchers who are all studying cancer, too. 

“Cancer treatment is so harsh. I see it, I work with it, and I hate it. If we can provide people with something less strenuous on the body, like a probiotic, and that can help their cancer treatment, that’s awesome. And with adaptive therapy, prolonging people’s lives would be an incredible achievement. I want to get cancer to a point where people can live with it rather than having it be a death sentence at its later stages.” 

Brit Burgard – Plant Biology and Conservation 

Anyone who lives in the western US has probably heard of wildfires near where they live, if they haven’t encountered them directly. One hit particularly close to home for Brit Burgard, a second-year master’s student in the Plant Biology and Conservation program. In 2021, she was living in Superior, Arizona, when the Telegraph Fire hit, which burned over 180,000 acres –– about the area of Austin, Texas.  

Burgard was working at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum then and was part of the effort to help protect the garden against the fire. Afterwards, when she began her master’s at ASU, she wondered what the wildfire’s effects on the desert were. 

“Wildfire is increasing in the Sonoran Desert as a result of climate change and invasive species,” Burgard explains. “That increase was something I wanted to look at because the Sonoran Desert isn't considered fire adapted. But we don't necessarily know a lot about how fire affects individual species, and we can clearly see that some of the larger sort of keystone species are affected negatively.” 

To begin understanding how the Sonoran Desert reacts to wildfire, Burgard conducted a flora, or catalog of species, along the perimeter of the area burned by the Telegraph fire within the desert. So far, she’s found that some species, like brittlebush and globe mallow, can return well after a fire, as fire releases some nutrients into the soil. But other species, like saguaro, might not be able to bounce back so easily. 

With that in mind, Burgard has also spent much of her master’s conducting research att he Boyce Thompson Arboretum on saguaro restoration. She monitors how young saguaros grow when planted at different ages and with differing access to water to inform researchers who will try to replant saguaros in the future.  

“It was very fun to do that. When I worked at BTA, I actually seeded the saguaro (that I used for the project. So it was great to come back to them.” 

That work, which she does outside of her master’s thesis, has largely been funded by the Benson award, which is awarded to graduate students who want to do conservation research at the arboretum. Burgard has won the award twice.  

“I’m extremely honored to have received that award. It was really awesome because it allowed me to focus on my work.” 

By studying both the after effects of wildfire and looking into strategies to help the desert rebound, Burgard’s work should help other researchers better protect the Arizona wilderness in the face a of a changing climate.