Narratives

Roksana Azad was born in Bangladesh and grew up in a very rural area that was made up of small villages. She was the only student in her school who was interested in science, and in high school she had to go to a nearby larger town to attend science classes. She and her family emigrated to the US in 2011 and moved to Queens, where she attended York College. Although she had been able to take some science classes back home, she didn’t know anything about scientific research or labs, or that it was even possible to become a grad student and start a PhD program. Fortunately, in an undergraduate biochemistry class she found a mentor who was studying an enzyme that was relevant to disease, and eventually he accepted her to work in his lab.

She then pursued her PhD in the Structural Biology Initiative at the CUNY ASRC, studying biophysics. A postdoc had told her about opportunities available in the ASRC IlluminationSpace (and Roksana says that in return, she also always told new students coming to CUNY ASRC about the IlluminationSpace). She began to volunteer at the IlluminationSpace, giving groups of high school students tours of the ASRC and also giving talks about her research, about where she came from, what got her interested in science, and what structural biology is, using simpler terms so high school students can understand. She also visited public high schools around New York City and volunteered with other science outreach programs. She says that she has always really enjoyed doing outreach, saying: “I was always someone who wanted to do more outreach activities because I felt like I kind of owe that to people like me.” Roksana continues to be interested in doing outreach, and hopes someday soon to return to CUNY ASRC and the IlluminationSpace.

Carolyn Ferguson is the environmental justice manager at Red Hook Initiative, a Brooklyn-based non-profit that works with residents of Red Hook Houses and offers programming for elementary and middle school students, such as homework help, STEAM-based learning, college exploration, and health education and counseling. Carolyn’s work is built around a community science program that was co-created with the IlluminationSpace Hub’s Community Sensor Lab (CSL), located at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC). Her pathway began when she became a CSL fellow in 2023, learning how to build and deploy Arduino-based air quality sensors and interpret the collected data.

Carolyn’s fellowship experience, which included attending lectures at the CUNY ASRC, helped to expand her relationship with researchers and show her that anyone can do science. “Even if you just have a hypothesis about something, it’s worth studying, figuring it out and seeing what the why is,” she says. “I was doing science as just a regular community person with all these college students with their degrees, the professors, but they did not make me feel like I was missing or lacking anything. It was a collaborative atmosphere.”

One particular highlight for Carolyn is that the CSL team travels to Red Hook frequently so that residents don’t always have to go to the lab in Manhattan to get help. Such reciprocal relationship building creates pathways for non-traditional participants and members of marginalized communities to gain experience with scientific research and access to two- and four-year CUNY college opportunities.

Carolyn’s time as a CSL fellow allowed her to develop relationships with researchers and IlluminationSpace Hub staff who helped her to build on her newly developed skills. In 2024 the CSL partnered with RHI and helped them to secure funding from the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), which has allowed Carolyn to begin training other Red Hook community members in building and deploying sensors and gathering and analyzing sensor data This underscores the reciprocal relationship in which the community and researchers support and learn from each other.

Favour Achimba, a CUNY Graduate Center Biochemistry Ph.D. student, is researching snail venom-derived peptides with the potential to target liver cancer. In 2021, Favour became an IlluminationSpace Hub science communication fellow and member of Cohort 2. She was drawn to the opportunity because she believed it would help her develop skills to simplify science for high school and undergraduate students, especially those in developing countries. “Growing up, I struggled with Math and Chemistry because the concepts felt so abstract,” said Favour.  “I didn’t understand why an atom would have an excited electron or why calculus was important. The Science Communication Fellowship gave me the training to simplify science and make it fun. It was the stepping stone for the project I’m now building.”

For her fellowship capstone project, Favour collaborated with an artist, exploring the creative similarities between art and science during a social media takeover on Zoom and the ASRC YouTube channel. Her cohort partnered with CUNY MFA students to discuss how science and art influence each other and how scientists take artistic liberties in their work.

In addition, the 2022 cohort worked together to film and edit videos to create content for the Community Sensor Lab (CSL) GiveGab fundraiser. They interviewed CUNY students who were CSL interns about their experiences and helped create a social media campaign to promote the fundraiser. Altogether, for Favour, the experience underscored the need for imagination in science.

Favour also wrote a story for the ASRC website about the ASRC Sensor CAT, which helps ASRC researchers and students build STEM entrepreneurship skills. The goal was to write about science through a layman’s lens and cover a topic outside of her field of expertise to help her become a more nimble science communicator. Read Favour’s story here: Building STEM Entrepreneurship Through the ASRC Sensor CAT.

Favour most appreciates the IlluminationSpace Hub for its work with communities that lack access to well-resourced STEM research centers, and for helping young students access scientific research experiences that support and grow their STEM interest. Since completing the fellowship, Favour has been called on to write science spotlights for the Biochemistry Program at the Graduate Center. She has also served as a social media volunteer for the Venom Gordon Research Conference and Seminar in 2022.

She has found including her science communication fellowship experience on her CV to be very helpful. “I always include that in my CV, and it’s been really helpful for some of the positions I’ve gotten,” said Favour. “Last year, I was in the prestigious neurobiology course at the Marine Biological Lab, and one of the reasons I was accepted into the program was because of my contributions to the SciCom Fellowship, and I was able to show that. It’s been a really helpful and useful experience, having new skills for communicating with community members, especially at the start of my graduate program.”

Katherine Anderson is a member of the second cohort of IlluminationSpace Hub science communication fellows, and she is also co-founder of CUNY SciCom, a student-led organization that gives students experience translating and presenting their research to lay audiences. She recently completed her PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology program. Her research, conducted in the Osceola Whitney Lab at City College, is on the brain mechanisms that control song code-switching in the zebra finch.

Katherine began helping other CUNY Graduate Center (GC) students to become better science communicators, which soon became an official GC student group called CUNY SciCom. In May 2025, CUNY SciCom hosted its fifth annual symposium, held at the CUNY ASRC. Over the past five years the group has showcased oral and poster presentations from 38 CUNY graduate students coming from 14 STEM graduate programs, across 9 CUNY campuses. In 2025 the organizing team of 6 PhD students volunteered their time and expertise to train eight speakers, who were given awards thanks to continuous institutional support from the IlluminationSpace, the Graduate Center, and private donors.

During this same period Katherine became a SciCom Fellow and worked to create connections between the two programs, becoming a mentor to other grad students while learning science communication skills herself. She found that the fellowship’s personalized support was very responsive to her needs and helped her to not only learn science communication skills but also soft skills as well, such as organizing conferences, which has come in handy for organizing the annual CUNY SciCom Symposium. She has found the IllluminationSpace to be very helpful in connecting with resources and networks as well as offering access to one-on-one support, and says that for other students who need to be connected to resources or networks it’s very valuable, saying, “It’s a useful record of the knowledge and resources available and a good way to help people connect with what they’re trying to find.”

Watch a 3-minute overview of Katie’s research from the Grad Center Dissertation Showcase.

Rocheli Apilan is a high school chemistry teacher at a New York City public high school. In 2018 she volunteered to be a judge at a science fair, where she met a researcher from the  City University of New York Advanced Science Research Center (CUNY ASRC). The researcher invited her and her students to visit the ASRC, which they did, and which galvanized the students’ interest in doing research. They then went back to their school and told other students, and Rocheli’s research class grew. She continued to bring groups of students for field trips, where they saw first-hand how scientists collaborate. She then brought a group of five students to work on co-creating a Do-It-Yourself sensor building program, which was the inspiration for starting the Community Sensor Lab.  Those five students then brought the ideas back to their school, where they trained other students in how to build sensors.

Her students then attended a week-long photonics research intensive at the CUNY ASRC with an ASRC researcher, Gabriele Grosso, and IlluminationSpace staff to develop a photonics module that Rocheli taught in her classroom. CUNY ASRC researchers continued to come to her school, and two of Rocheli’s students worked with Community Sensor Lab staff over the summer. Rocheli values how her students’ experience at the ASRC helps prepare them for college, and inspires them to do science research. She also sees the mentoring her students’ receive as one of the most important outcomes from partnering with the IlluminationSpace,saying, “Mentoring is a good way to help students, but it’s hard to find. The ASRC opens its windows and doors for mentoring. Mentorship is the number one thing that we want for our students because teachers alone cannot guide them.”

Daniel Okpattah grew up in Accra, Ghana, received a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree from the University of Ghana, then made his way to the CUNY Graduate Center’s biochemistry Ph.D. program in 2021. He studies the molecular processes that drive prostate cancer in Wayne Harding’s lab at Hunter College and in Kishore Pillarsetty’s lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. His passion for cancer research began during his undergraduate studies when he heard a podcast about cancer treatment, common misconceptions about cancer, and how lifestyle factors influence cancer risk. It also introduced him to the importance and impact of science communication. Daniel became a SciCom Fellow (Cohort 3) during his second year of PhD studies. “I knew I needed to  improve my writing and speaking skills so that people who aren’t scientists can understand and relate to my work,” he says.

During the fellowship, Daniel worked with a diverse cohort of fellows whose disciplines spanned physics, environmental sciences, biology and health and science journalism. The skills-building experience included pairing him with a student from the Health and Science Reporting program at the CUNY Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism to create an episode for the CUNY Graduate Center’s The Thought Project podcast about how prostate cancer develops and why some forms are harder to treat than others. Co-learning with a journalist also gave him real life experience with media generation. The experience pushed him to be able to explain his research to journalists and general audiences in a manner that connects beyond the technical aspects of his work. “It ultimately helped me to be able to communicate the complexities of my research to my mother in a way that she can understand.”

Daniel was also a CUNY Open Knowledge Fellow. “These two fellowships were both transformative experiences that shaped the way I think about science communication,” said Daniel. “I learned how to break down complex scientific ideas and make them accessible to a broader audience, which includes communities with no understanding of the subject matter. They helped me see that science isn’t complete until it’s shared in a way that people can understand and use. This mindset has deeply influenced how I approach my work, especially in cancer research, where clear communication can empower patients and impact lives.”

Being a science communication fellow allowed Daniel to connect with researchers outside of his field, and when the podcast went live, to hear from people who were interested in the public health applications of his work, such as preventative measures. The experience reinforced his commitment to outreach and helped to expand his toolkit for giving back to his community, especially in Ghana, by going to schools to talk about his career and research. “That’s basically my passion – to be able to let these kids understand that there’s just a lot of things you can do, there’s also a way out for you, you can become something else.”

Rosa Meyo – a native New Yorker – was a physics major at CUNY’s Lehman College when she applied to the CUNY ServiceCorp internship program, where she was selected as a science facilitator for the IlluminationSpace program. She soon found herself at the CUNY ASRC, which was the first time she had ever been to a science research center. There, in addition to being exposed to the research being conducted, she became a science facilitator in the IlluminationSpace, where she received mentoring in science education and outreach. She has described the mentoring experience as “inspirational, holistic and interpersonal” and says it helped her visualize herself as a scientist. She also witnessed community members coming to the IlluminationSpace and saw how their faces would light up. After her year-long experience in the Illumination Space, Rosa worked as a lab technician in Shana Elbaum-Garfinkle’s lab in the Structural Biology Initiative at CUNY ASRC. Now in her 4th year of a PhD in biophysics at Johns Hopkins, Rosa says, “My experience in the IlluminationSpace is the reason why I ended up where I am.” She also says she is still working on her science communication skills, wanting to be sure that what she’s saying about her work is accurate, tangible and relatable.

Mike Spade grew up in New York City, and realized early on that he was drawn to nature and being outside. He worked as a community gardener, became involved with rooftop gardening, and eventually moved to Denver where he managed rooftop farms. Looking for skills that would not be so taxing physically, he remembered his earlier interest in computers and gaming and taught himself coding skills. Moving back to NYC, Mike was working at The Knowledge House in the Bronx when he reconnected with Kendra Krueger, whom he first met in Colorado, and she invited Mike to come visit the Community Sensor Lab (CSL) at CUNY ASRC. For Mike, the CSL was the perfect combination of coding and environmental science, as the CSL team was developing projects on monitoring the environment with single board computers. It was a place where Mike’s two passions could intersect.

Mike quickly became a CSL intern, and then a trainer, training other interns, and eventually a STEM Teacher Residency Fellow. During his residency he designed and worked on a project with CUNY ASRC photonics researcher Arno Thielans on developing a way to measure our daily exposure to electromagnetic waves through common devices such as laptops and cell phones. Today Mike is the Teaching and Learning Manager at The Knowledge House, which offers online tech bootcamps. Mike is most appreciative of how the Community Sensor Lab offered an opportunity to gain scientific knowledge and to get familiar with the tools of science, saying, “All you need to do is to be curious, and to be willing to back up that curiosity with some action, to be able to go and then maybe try and prove your theory.”