I had the chance to attend the 2025 Gulf Coast Undergraduate Research Symposium (GCURS) at Rice University last week. I had a blast. I learned a lot about communicating scientific work to a broader community, and I also made some awesome friends!

The Gulf Coast Undergraduate Research Symposium is hosted by Rice University every year in the fall. The conference brings together undergraduate researchers from across the US to present their work. While undergraduates are eligible only to present posters at most conferences, GCURS allows only talks—so it is a very different experience than something like the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology annual meeting. I liked the emphasis on presentation and discussion. It was great practice, and I felt that presenting here forced me to consider again the context of my research and why people should care about it.

GCURS has specific sections for different fields: materials science, chemistry, applied mathematics, physics, and of course biosciences. My only regret from GCURS is that I didn’t try to attend talks in other sections—the schedules didn’t line up very well across fields, so I decided to stay within the biosciences. When I spoke with other students at the reception, I heard about other talks that people had seen in the synthetic chemistry session and the physics section that sounded super cool. If I have the chance to attend GCURS 2026, I will make it a point to run across sections to attend other presentations.

This was my first time traveling solo, so I felt pretty nervous. I had a few delays on my flights, but luckily everything worked out and I landed in Houston with time to spare. GCURS provides a number of travel awards, and I’m very grateful to the organizers (especially Dale Thomas in the SSPB section) for their generosity and help in getting to the meeting. Although I don’t handle flights too well, excitement about the conference overrode any jet lag or queasiness.

All of the life sciences at GCURS are grouped together under the umbrella Biosciences section. There were four rounds of talks throughout the day, and during each round there were three rooms of presenters. Students presented on everything from engineering memories in mice to simulating RNA folding to evolving oil-eating bacteria. GCURS is unique in that there are no posters allowed. October 18th was a continuous stream of polished talks and fantastic research, with only a short break for lunch and a reception at the end. I must’ve taken some 30 pages of notes during the conference. I just finished scanning and saving them, but only in the past few days did I have the time to start pulling out references from them and following up on some of the ideas I wrote down.

Out of all of the talks that I saw, my favorite was one presented by a student who had started working with his friends to find a solution to army worm infestations. He and his friends surveyed local farmers, did some tests, and decided to start engineering a biosynthesis pathway for piperine into yeast to produce it as a non-hazardous pesticide. One of the coolest bootstrapping efforts I’ve heard of in biotechnology. They’re now testing a couple different strategies in yeast, so they’ve brought this project from the farm into the lab! I’m excited to hear about when they take it back out and apply it.

I presented my talk, “Synthetic Protein Waves for Tunable Molecular Organization Across Biological Scales,” in the Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology (SSPB) section. I felt nervous about giving my talk walking into the room. I also made the mistake of drinking a cup of coffee with lunch, so I was a little jittery from the caffeine. Once I had my slides up and started speaking, I felt much better. In my opinion, this was the best version of the talk that I’ve given—glad that I didn’t spend that one on a practice round.

I love sharing the work that we do in my lab - it’s fun for me to think about it and find ways to show other people how it could be used. Much of modern synthetic biology is bioengineering: creating living systems that fulfill a certain function, like the aforementioned oil-eating microbes or protein-based contaminant probes. The research that I work on with the Coyle lab is more concerned with the theory and exploration of synthetic biology principles. To motivate this work, we have to communicate potential applications for the systems that we study. This sparks a lot of speculative questions, which I enjoy answering—people take the ball and run with it!

I received some suggestions and ideas after my talk, including a recommendation that I speak to Professor Matthew Bennett about his work on oscillating systems. As it turns out, he attended the events hosted during the morning of October 19th, so I had a chance to ask him some questions. His work on instantiating differentiation in E. coli systems looks awesome, and I can’t wait to learn more about it. Some of my new friends also sent me some papers to read, so my inbox is now overflowing. It’s a good place to be.

This year, Rice University also partnered with the Goldwater Scholars Community (GSC) to host the Goldwater Summit. This was a few events held before and after the symposium, where we all had the chance to meet each other in person and talk about our research.

On Friday the GSC hosted a social for early arrivals. While I arrived at the tail end of the social, I did go out for a late dinner with some of the Goldwater scholars and the GSC conference committee. One of the people I met there happens to work in neurophysiology and we got to talking about the synaptic patterns that lead to different methods of signal processing in neurons. Because I’ve spent all of my time in research studying protein oscillations, we ended up talking about the patterns that can lead to periodic signals. We started talking in the car on the way to the restaurant, and I don’t think we stopped talking until we left—about two hours later. One of the organizers said “this happens every time,” which sounds typical—people who go to conferences are total nerds, and Goldwater scholars are like super-nerds.

The actual summit was hosted Saturday evening after the talks, and it really just gave us all another chance to talk to one another and continue conversations started throughout the conference. We also had the chance to take photos—lots of fun. A huge thanks to all of the scholars in the GSC who made this possible: Joia Kai Cappochi, Cora Lyon, Matthew Lu, Paul Nguyen, Sophia Boler, Nicole Li, Monique Kubovsky, Cole Woody, Chloe Razolsky, Lawrence Scafuri, Wimeth Dissanayake, Marlyn Li, and Autumn Landwehr.

GCURS 2025 was phenomenal. I got to meet a lot of people who are also doing a lot of really amazing things. I’ve only attended a couple of conferences, but I enjoy the atmosphere: there’s a lot of people who are all very invested in science, packed into one venue. It’s a great place to get excited about new results and exchange ideas. It’s a chance to fall in love with the science all over again.