Research Blog

When I visited college campuses last year, there were two must-see destinations at each: the libraries and the forests (gardens would suffice at those unfortunate institutions which, by the whims of geography, lacked a sylvan space). Those two places also happen to be where I am most liable to be found when classes and tasks allow. An intriguing volume, a maze of shelves, a mossy glen, or a stand of oak or pine, and I am in my element.

Homeschooled from kindergarten onwards, I was just about never more than a few feet from a book. I believe some significant portion of the public library’s collections was usually in one corner of the living room, my parents’ books lined the walls, a burgeoning collection began to fill – then overfill – my bedroom shelf, all of which impelled me to grow up on books like bacterial colonies on agarose. I learned from books, recreated with books, and began to gain an appreciation for learning for its own sake.

Despite this apparent bibliophilia, it is love and awe for the natural world that have primarily driven my interests since at least age five, when I turned my innocent quest for encyclopedic knowledge from dinosaurs to extant animals (giving my mom a much-needed break from being Mrs. Protoceratops). I obsessively read about cassowaries or tardigrades with my best friend and began to amass the collection of exotic stuffed animals that would later form a self-governing republic and conduct mass experiments in electoral systems. Now, I explore the outdoors whenever possible, whether by foot, bicycle, kayak, or cross-country ski, yearning for the freedom of a snow-covered woodland or a bog ablaze with fall color. 

Recently, I’ve begun to see commonalities between Nico the bookworm and Nico of the forest frolic. I would like to think that I can attribute those connections to exposure to the realm of research. Since beginning work in a botany lab the summer before 11^th grade, I have seen those all-important forests with new eyes, trying my best to understand the mechanisms that drive their function, no hike too minor an occasion to be infused with the spirit of inquiry. What is the taxonomy of this striking fern? What evolutionary processes transformed lycophytes from pillars of the Carboniferous swamp-forests to humble, fuzzy Christmas-tree lookalikes crawling along the boreal forest floor? With the tools of modern science, the contents of ecosystems can be read almost like those of libraries, their eDNA forming a catalog, community ecology supplying the collection structure, and each organism’s biology holding a wealth of information.

Books, conversely, come alive under the investigative eye. Through classes focused on the methods of historical scholarship, I’ve learned how texts must be examined through their context; each author, work, or moment in time is deeply interconnected with many others. The flow of ideas through societal systems may not be too dissimilar from the flow of energy through natural ones. Most of all, libraries and forests share a sense of timelessness, that moment when the vastness of evolutionary deep-time catches you in a pensive mood, or when you begin to wonder, after spending too long browsing labyrinthine stacks or inscrutable pages, whether Borges may not have been right, after all, that the universe is composed of a library infinite in space and time, of which the center is undefined and the perimeter inaccessible.

I am Nico Zepeda, a freshman from Madison, Wisconsin. I plan to major in biology, with a whole host of other fields like history, philosophy, environmental science, and architecture that I hope to explore in parallel. I am thrilled to be in an environment like Duke, where fascinating, interdisciplinary research is around every corner, and I am even more excited to interact directly with Duke’s dynamic researchers and share their work through the Research Blog!

Every day is a surprise. As a freshman, I never imagined taking a class where I would be reading physical copies of books that have existed centuries before us. I hold in my hands a 1522 edition of “Vitruvii De architectura libri decem“ by Vitruvius Pollio. Five hundred and two years of history since the book was published, with thousands more found within its very pages. I trace my fingertips across the book, barely larger than my palm, and its aged pages that are stained with dirt, oil, and dust.

Despite being in a language incomprehensible to my modern-English mind, the book seems to whisper stories and secrets that are embedded within its pages. Parallel to the research we conduct on these literatures, we also learn how the greats have done so for centuries before us. Leonardo da Vinci once studied this same book (albeit a different literal copy of the book) and applied Vitruvius’ theories of proportion to studying the human body. His meticulous investigations led him to produce “The Vitruvian Man,” blending both art and science to investigate the natural world.

So, just like how Leonardo studied the world before and around him, we find ourselves in modern day doing the same. We study history, of the curiosity, thinking, and discoveries that make up the pinnacles of human pursuit, and we explore life, of the emotions, nature, technology, and behaviors that guide and shift our every day.

As part of the team at the Duke Research Blog, I wish to share ongoing research that is relevant and connected to you, the reader. I ask myself what information can I share to make the reader better informed about the choices, actions, people, and objects that surround their lives. From the community initiatives to the groundbreaking research to the hidden stories waiting to be uncovered, there’s always something new to learn and share. I want to shine a light on these unique stories and bring awareness to the causes and impacts that define our community.

To begin this journey, I want to first share my story. I come from Richmond, Virginia, where I lived for 16 years. My perfect day would consist of spending time at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) and my local 2nd & Charles bookstore. While I am keeping my options open for my major, I am orienting my interests toward pursuing health and bioethics policy. Specifically, I hope to improve how we understand and define “sickness”—whether of the body or the mind. I believe that the current medical system fails to treat patients for their best wellness, often promoting treatments that produce more harm than good.

Just as I aim to help patients understand their options in healthcare, I wish to help people better understand the research that impacts their lives. Through my work, I hope to share beneficial and informative insights about the up-and-coming research happening around us. I can’t wait to see what the future holds, and I look forward to what we uncover together!

When battling lack of quality sleep and what may or may not be black mold-induced sickness, I know I rely on my Writing 101 class to be the highlight of my day. (Current freshmen, take Neuroscience & Society next semester and thank me later.) Unrelated to all the intriguing questions and research we look at in there, it was also because of this class that I would find a new way to approach identity upon viewing Taiye Selasi’s TED Talk, “Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From, Ask Me Where I’m a Local.”

So with this philosophy in mind, I’ll introduce myself. 

I’m a local of my hometown, Ocala, a town in central Florida mainly known for having an extreme number of horse farms and trademarking itself as the Horse Capital of the World (sorry, Lexington). Though I didn’t grow up on any sort of farm, our family’s habit of going to the small animal auction “for fun” in my elementary school years soon led us to become the caretakers of many chickens, other miscellaneous birds, and a couple of rabbits. We no longer have these, but we do live within walking distance of many small family farms. Sometimes, I’ll greet the miniature horses while my one remaining companion, Roxie, watches them suspiciously from a distance.

The occasional summer was spent in the Xinyi District, my home base when visiting my mom’s relatives. The city of Taipei is just the opposite of Ocala, so large and fascinating that I felt like–and was–a tourist most of the time. But Xinyi is familiar to me, and my family is very local there. My grandmother’s apartment sits in an older section that existed before its development, situated around the corner from all that’s shiny and modern in the capital’s finance and shopping district. When I step outside, I can see Taipei 101 and know it’s a ten minute walk to the iconic skyscraper, or ten minutes by car to the Elephant Mountain trail if I feel like climbing stairs for a better view of the city. Our daily rituals here revolved around food and walking–I used to think I disliked cities, but I had just never met a walkable city with night markets. 

Taiwan is my favorite place on Earth, and my favorite piece of writing I ever wrote was about our breakfast runs there. In my next few years, I hope to get enough traveling and writing under my belt that those two things might change. 

In writing for the Duke Research Blog, I aim to accomplish a couple of things. A) Indulge my inner child that aspired to be a scientific journalist. B) Take a sneak peek into various fields. While I (regrettably) can’t major in five different areas at once, I’ll cheerfully settle for running around campus and interviewing pioneers of all disciplines about their work. C) Highlight research related to issues of real world relevance and importance. I originally wrote for my high school paper because I felt there was a need for environmental awareness in my area. In the same vein, the gap between what we learn from research and what occurs in the real world is largely why many of our society’s issues persist today; academia isn’t accessible to the general public. And yet, at Duke, we’re surrounded by more progress and discussion than we could ever hope to be aware of. That’s where I come into play, looking for what might get skipped over and bringing bite-sized pieces of news to you–all while becoming a local here in Durham, North Carolina. 

I find it easier to explain myself through my experiences with others’ writing.

If you were to peer into my soul, you would see a display of my late-night highlighted sentences and the pen’s ink bruising my favorite words. And if you were to peer into my brain, you would see what happens when a reader of fiction and non-fiction and poetry and everything in between falls in love and decides (or more accurately, realizes) that these are who will teach her. 

However, this isn’t true for all of me. For example, my name is Sarah Suzanne Pusser. Though I would like to say my parents named me after their favorite heroine in a book, I hate to inform you that my name is a medley of my family’s names before me — Sarah, being my mother’s middle name, Suzanne, being my aunt’s middle name, and Pusser, being the last name my father brought to the family that either people can’t pronounce or are too scared to try to. 

But who am I if only the attributes I never got to choose for myself? 

I grew up being told that knowledge is power. And while this is true, knowledge can also be “silly.” On my seventh birthday, I was gifted Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing,” along with the rest of the “Fudge” series. It was my treat after what felt like a lifetime of farm chores (I had to pick blueberries). Curled up in a ball on my bed, I just remember laughing, and laughing, and laughing. And in the moments of silence, I remember learning that it wasn’t just me who thought being an older sibling was hard. 

I am someone who finds both purpose and joy in learning. I am a proud older sister to the most wonderful younger brother.

In eighth grade, I wanted to challenge myself by reading a “really difficult book.” So, of course, I chose John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and boy did I hate it. I spent weeks forcing myself to “just get to the next page.” But eventually, I was done with the book, and with the feeling of pride for keeping my promise to finish the book came another feeling that something else had to be done; every piece of information I’d just read deserved to continue living. I talked to everyone I could. I asked my friends what they thought happened when they died (I know, what a mood killer), I asked my parents if they believed in religion, and through this relationship of telling and questioning, I taught those around me a single perspective (John Bunyan’s), and in return gained the perspective of dozens of others. 

I am someone who keeps a promise (no matter how indigestible the writing is). I am someone who asks questions.  I am someone who believes that curiosity and teaching should be paired together. 

I picked up Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” because I loved the cover, and you can imagine my excitement when I figured out that the story was even better. I found myself sneaking a headlamp into my room on school nights so I could learn more about the life of Theodore Decker; simply put, this was my first instance of being emotionally attached to a book. I just needed to read it. Writing this now, I can’t really put into words why I loved this book—all I know is that this was the book that revealed my love of writing. I saw how language changed my perception of the world, and I wanted to be the creator of that for others. 

I am a writer. I am a writer. I am a writer.

Now, as a member of Duke’s class of 2028 and the Duke Research Blog, I am excited to introduce my curiosity to the infinite realms of research at Duke and let my love for writing curate the questions and answers into something you will look forward to reading.