APICAL Award Speech

This August 26th 2024, I was awarded the APICAL Award for Persistent Involvement in Community And Leadership from the UPenn Neuroscience Graduate Group’s (NGG) Graduate Led Initiatives and Activities (GLIA) community. I was told I was given the award for my consistent and remarkable dedication to the graduate group over the years. Humbled, I gave a fairly personal speech at the NGG retreat, hoping to touch and inspire the graduate students at the beginning and end of their PhD journey. This is the speech I gave.

My name is Ilenna Simone Jones. I was born in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Ironically, the closest big university to me was Penn State. My mom spent time on and off as a single mother, but more often than not we struggled with poverty. When you grow up in poverty, your version of normal is not actually as painful as you’d think. When you’re the eldest of 4, you also key in on the needs of your parents and your siblings a little more. You ask for less. You tell yourself to wait. You reassure yourself that things will work out. You make yourself small, but you do whatever you can to support your family, even as a child. Even in this, the good things shone bright. A $5 allowance to buy new toys. Trips to all you can eat buffets. Back to school shopping. Juice. The end of naptime. There were so many good, simple things I was grateful for.

My mom, though she struggled, kept an eye out for opportunities for her children. She brought me to a preschool event where I was introduced to quantification by comparison. Rulers. An inch as a unit of measurement. Length, width, my own height. I know this is a deep cut, but this experience really set things in motion. What else can I measure?

When people paint a picture of a scientist, they often point to Einstein, and create a legend that as a child, the scientist had always been passionate about the thing that eventually earned them the Nobel prize. Frankly, it’s an impossible picture. People are way more multifaceted than that. My interest in the brain came with big and small drops into the pool of my lived experience. I was only able to receive and be impacted by those drops because of my own curiosity about many things.

As a kid, I loved subverting authority by “weaponizing” my curiosity to ask questions that adults might not know the answer to. Why is the sky blue? What is a microbe? How do astronauts know which way north is when they are on the moon? You know, questions anyone could ask, but doesn’t know the answer to. But the wonderful thing about questions is that they open your mind. They make you receptive to new ideas and even more questions. My favorite question, that no one knew the answer to, that I couldn’t answer myself, was “Why do I think the way I do?”

Those drops into the pool of my lived experience soon became something I was thirsty for. At eight, during a take-your-kid-to-work day at the VA medical hospital, I touched a real slice of human brain and would not shut up about it for a month. At 13, an anime called Fullmetal Alchemist sparked my interest in how prosthetic limbs interface with the nervous system. At 14, a book on the history of our knowledge of the brain taught me that we could be so, so very wrong about a great many things.

At 15, as part of a research class in high school, I tried to volunteer in a neuroscience lab at Johns Hopkins. I emailed exactly one professor who studied motor coordination in the cerebellum, but received no response. I encountered the first pitfall detailed in the hidden curriculum of academia: always email professors twice. He never responded, and my parents, thinking I wasn’t taking the program seriously, told me I needed to drop the research class. It was a failure I never was prepared for: letting an opportunity slip out of your grasp.

As I was leaving, my teacher gave me a brochure for a different research program at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth. Eager, I seized this opportunity, determined not to let it slip away. This summer camp, or “nerd camp”, was absolutely transformative - I was surrounded by peers who genuinely wanted to learn. This experience has shaped my pursuit of academia ever since.

When I began at my first lab experience in a translational, neuropsychiatric epigenetics lab in 2010, I was scared, but galvanized to try as hard as I could to make the experience work. There, I met Zach, a postdoc who became my mentor and role model. He valued my ideas despite my lack of experience, teaching me that good ideas are appreciated in science regardless of status. These lessons, set by example, made me yearn for more, that science as a career could reflect these values I was starting to hold for myself.

Fast forward to starting at UPenn in 2017. I had carried these lessons forward with me. I had been doing research every summer and every year since 2010. I chose UPenn because of a myriad of factors. But what made NGG stand out from all the other programs was the culture and community. It was the only program where I met first year all the way to varsity students in the interview weekend. I felt so taken care of. The administration staff were so welcoming. I was deciding between 3 schools and NGG won out, in part because upon meeting the fervent friendliness of the students, I knew I’d be in the right place.

When recruitment came around, I joked that I became “rabid” with excitement - that I just gave my all to the new students. I wanted them to feel as welcome and appreciated as I felt when I interviewed. I wanted to pay it forward. This became a pattern. There were so many lessons I learned during every year of PhD, and even before that, that I wanted to give to new students. I saw myself in many of them too. The bright-eyed, bushy-tailed excitement. I wanted to keep that energy alive as long as possible for them. Knowing that the pool of my lived experience had so much to give was empowering to me.

I’m painting a bit of a rosy picture of my first years of PhD, I realize. I honestly struggled a ton. I failed core II because I didn’t ask any questions. I was put on academic probation. I had a lot of difficulties with my mental health. Many escapist tendencies. But, like a roller coaster, things did not always go down. I had many late-night conversations with friends, formed study groups with classmates, and asked for a ton of help. After I postponed my candidacy exam, I accepted that I needed to stop comparing myself to my cohort and other students. I was on my own path. Everyone was on their own path.

4 months later, I doubled-down and passed my exam with flying colors. I embraced the freedom of 3rd year life. Then the pandemic hit, and lockdowns began February 2020. We all thought the lockdowns would last for a couple of weeks. It was a very dark time. Honestly it was a blur for me. But I also was lucky. My computational work could go on, while so many other students were massively delayed.

When summer 2020 came and the George Floyd protests happened, it was so extremely difficult, socially. The E.E. Just society became a big place where I found thoughtful, deliberate discussion, and a way I could express my sense of activism through education. I helped lead discussions in BGS and in my lab about the history of scientific racism, systemic inequality, and allyship. Following the summer, I was recruited to help with the Combatting Racial Inequities Committee, which helped direct financial resources to IDEAL to hire more people to effectively support students and postdocs. It was exhausting, but I felt like I was doing something, which is what a lot of people wanted to feel around that time.

When nearly a year had passed and the 2021 interview cohort was coming through, I tried hard to be as welcoming as I could, even though a screen is a massive facsimile of human presence. But it was enough. Maybe it was for them, maybe it was for me, but I kept reaching out to some students who had a rapport and tried to be there for them during their first and 2nd years of covid. When restrictions started to be lifted, it was huge to meet these students in person. I felt more than just being their mentor, but also their friends, someone they could trust, someone I could trust.

This is what I feel sets NGG apart - the ability to hold together and give to each other when things are hard. GLIA is vibrant. NGG is vibrant. We come to these kinds of events and see each other, when frankly, we don’t have to. We want to.

I’m at a new institute at Harvard now that started slightly less than a year ago, and I’m working to build the community NGG just gave me so easily. I’m working hard because I realize the thing that really keeps people going is not just the science. Not just the questions and the feeling of sorting things out. It’s the people, the culture of people who want to be there and want to see you do well too. People who see you as an equal, regardless of your position. People who value your ideas and what you give, regardless of if its a question or an answer. I’m in this because of the people. And the people of NGG have given so much to my pool of lived experience. I hope to give more from it wherever I go.