When Kiran Daulla started her senior year at UNT, she promised herself it would be her "yes" year.

"I'm really Type A, so I told myself that if someone says, 'Let's do this thing,' I wasn't going to say, 'OK, give me a few weeks -- I need to plan this out.' I was just going to try and say yes."

She said yes to events, friendships, research and to building a community of peer and faculty mentors, all of which would help her realize her educational dreams.

"UNT has so many events every day that you can start to take them for granted," she says. "My friends and I wouldn't have done these things, but we realized that we'll soon all be going our separate ways."

A Denton native, Kiran chose UNT after touring the Chemistry department with her high school AP Chemistry class. She knew she loved chemistry, but she wasn't sure where it would take her until she got a taste of life in the lab through the UNT PHAGES program.

Led by Lee Hughes, University Distinguished Teaching Professor of Biological Sciences and associate dean in the College of Science, the program provides opportunities for freshmen to participate in scientific research during their first year in college.

"Dr. Hughes made a really big impact on me," she says. "I knew I wanted to try research before I came to UNT, but I didn't know it was the path for me until I found the PHAGES program."

Most of Kiran's first year at UNT was online due to the pandemic, so when campus was back open for her sophomore year, she hit the ground running. She became an ambassador for the College of Science and landed her first on-campus job as a Peer-Led Team Learning leader. She served as president of the American Society for Microbiology student chapter and vice president of the American Chemical Society student chapter at UNT since 2021.

"Since my first year was isolating, I always make it a point to reach out to the students I tutor and ask, 'How are you feeling about your classes? Have you thought about what you might want to do for a career? I've made some mistakes that you probably don't have to.'"

She also began working on phage genetics in the lab of assistant professor Mauricio Antunes, who quickly became a core member of her growing team of UNT mentors, which included Dr. Hughes and Amy Petros, principal lecturer of Chemistry.

"I've never met anyone at UNT who wasn't accessible and empathetic, especially when I didn't know what I was doing," Kiran says.

In her junior year, Dr. Hughes and Dr. Antunes encouraged her to apply for the National Science Foundation's Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), a competitive 10-week program where students stay at a host institution and work alongside faculty and other researchers on a specific research project.

She was accepted into the REU site at the University of California, Riverside, where she worked on genetically engineering tomato plants to be more resistant to climate change using CRISPR Cas9 gene editing technology -- the very technology she'd learned about in her classes at UNT.

"The research was really independent, and it was rewarding having to figure out firsthand how to troubleshoot when things didn't work out."

She knew she belonged in the lab, but sometimes she'd question whether she deserved so many opportunities. Seeing the success of her graduate student mentor, also a minority woman in STEM, reassured her that she was where she was supposed to be.

"You hear stories of amazing people who've done amazing things, but those can seem out of reach. Having that one-on-one experience with someone who's going through the same things I'm going through was really rewarding. I want to be that person for someone."

This fall, Kiran will head to North Carolina State University to begin her doctoral degree in Genetics.

"I didn't know this until I did the NSF program, but getting a Ph.D. is essentially answering a question that has never been answered before," she says. "As someone who has some more questions coming out of undergrad than answers, that just seems like the coolest thing to me."

To any UNT student still searching for their place on campus, Kiran has reassurance that it's not always about finding the answer. You just have to ask the question.

"When I was an orientation leader last summer, I'd tell incoming students that the most daunting thing about coming to university can be making friends. Don't be afraid to go up to people and ask, 'Hey, can I sit with you?' or, 'Hey, we have an exam coming up. Do you want to make a study group?' The worst they can do is say no, and you might never even see them again -- UNT is a big place!"

The College of Science's commencement ceremony will be taking place in the UNT Coliseum at noon on Friday, May 10, 2024.

For more information about UNT Commencement, please visit https://www.unt.edu/commencement/

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