On Feb. 22, Naomi Rajput started her day by giving a TedX Talk in Northeastern University’s ISEC building. Rajput is fourth-year biological neuroscience major on a pre-med track; her 15-minute lecture, “The Growth Blueprint,” makes the case that facing challenges can make a person’s neural networks stronger, weaving together scientific studies and anecdotes from her own life.

“With effort, we can quite literally rewire our brains,” she argued in front of slides alternating brain scans and personal childhood photos. “The harder things you do, the stronger your mind becomes.”

Giving a Ted Talk would be a highlight of most undergraduate careers, but Rajput didn’t have much time to savor it. Later that day, she took part via Zoom in TigerLaunch — a national entrepreneurship competition for college students — pitching Eden, the AI health care startup she co-founded last year.

“We’re reimagining health care administration and bringing human connection back through AI,” says Rajput, recounting the company’s elevator pitch. The central idea is to leverage artificial intelligence to sort and complete mundane administrative tasks, like intake forms and call screening, so health care professionals have more face time with patients. It received an honorable mention at TigerLaunch.

And those two generally all-encompassing pursuits — a pre-med course load and research; building a startup — nevertheless represent a small part of Rajput’s interests and activities.

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Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University

One year ago on May 24, Northeastern student and campus yoga instructor Evan M. Kenny stood on top of Mount Everest, took off his oxygen mask for a moment — and just breathed.

“In and out, 10 times,” Kenny says.

The temperature below zero and low oxygen saturation in the atmosphere made inhaling painful, he says. “It was piercing my nose.”

“But I just had to have that experience and just sit there and have a meditative period.  The sun was rising and the full moon was setting in this perfect kind of tandem effect. It was like indescribable magic.”

What made the experience all the more rewarding was that just a few years earlier  Kenny’s body had been too beaten down by years as a Navy rescue swimmer and hotshot firefighter to take on such an extreme physical challenge.

Enrolling at Northeastern under a program for military veterans and becoming involved in the university’s yoga and meditation program helped set him on the path to healing in body and spirit, Kenny says.

In more than one way, the behavioral neuroscience major’s path to the Himalayas started on Northeastern’s Boston campus.

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Illustration by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University

Your typical college chemistry class is about following instructions and running lab tests, not actually experimenting with materials. But Chemistry 3100 is not your typical chemistry class.

Northeastern University’s new upper-level chemistry elective allows students to learn the chemical composition and structure of personal care products and then gives them the opportunity to develop their own.

“It really has been so interdisciplinary,” said Jillian Zerkowski, a fourth-year biochemistry major. “We got a comprehensive overview of what product forms exist and then we transitioned into products that we want to make and what there’s need for. It’s been really exciting to get to do that.”

The course originated from student interest. Leila Deravi, associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology, started a skin care company called Seaspire, inspired by her research on color change and cephalopods. Since founding Seaspire in 2019, Deravi said she’s received multiple emails a semester from students also interested in making their own cosmetics and learning the chemistry to do so. So she proposed an upper-level chemistry elective exploring the process of developing these products.

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Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University

Northeastern University researchers resurrected an extinct plant gene, turning back the evolutionary clock to pave a path forward for the development and discovery of new drugs.

Specifically, the team, led by Jing-Ke Weng, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and bioengineering at Northeastern, repaired a defunct gene in the coyote tobacco plant. In a new paper, they detail their discovery of a previously unknown kind of cyclic peptide, or mini protein, called nanamin that is easy to bioengineer, making it “a platform with huge potential for drug discovery,” Weng says.

“It will provide chemical biologists with other tools to develop new peptide-based cancer treatments, for discovering new antibiotics and also for agricultural applications for defense against pathogens and insects,” Weng says.

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Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University