2025, Quietly

 2025 Quietly

On neuroscience, disability, staying with the mess, and the work that continues anyway.

I don’t always write year-in-review posts; my last one was in 2022, the year I graduated from UC Berkeley; a giddy experience. But this one felt worth writing down—not as a highlight reel, but as a record of how a year actually unfolded.

2025 unfolded quietly—with a calendar that filled up faster than I expected and a body that occasionally reminded me (loudly) that plans are always provisional. Coming off a stressful 2024 dominated by qualifying exams, the year felt different—more open. Looking back, 2025 was a year of steady academic progress, the kind where progress doesn’t always feel dramatic in the moment, but adds up when you stop and actually take stock.

I love knowledge. The neuroscientist part of me is always looking for patterns, mechanisms, explanations—how systems adapt, where things break. That instinct hasn’t gone anywhere. But disability doesn’t work like a clean equation. And life doesn’t reduce to mechanisms.

There were health bumps this year. The kind that don’t ask permission. They slowed me down, forced adjustments, and reminded me—again—that there’s no clean story here. Disability is messy—messy, messy. Many days are just downright hard.

Academically, 2025 was one of my strongest grounding years yet. Not in a flashy way—but in the steady, settled sense that the work is maturing, finding its voice, and reaching the people it’s meant to reach.

Publishing entered the year quietly, through drafts, revisions, and the unfamiliar process of seeing early work move toward completion.

Journal publications (3 first-author, 2 co-author):

• Neurodiversity 2.0 - Harnessing cross-disciplinary disability insights
• Beyond Common Reassurances of “It’s OK”—The Reality of Anxiety in Autism
• Increasing Sample Diversity in Autism Research: Lessons from Multisensory Studies
• Promoting Classroom Engagement of Autistic Students Using Focused Interests
• Inclusion Must Be Global

Several other manuscripts are still winding their way through peer review—living in that space  of waiting and cautious optimism.

Alongside writing, I spent time on the other side of the process too: completing peer reviews, joining the editorial team of Autism in Adulthood, and serving as incoming Student Editor for Vanderbilt Reviews Neuroscience. Reviewing isn’t glamorous, but it’s where the research fields quietly decide what counts—a responsibility that should not be taken lightly.

On the research front, something important happened: I completed an initial pilot study for my own work. Careful steps, but real data. I also had my first dissertation committee meeting, which helped guide the direction of the research moving forward. Along the way, I presented my research at multiple conferences, received two research poster awards, and was invited to the Sigma Xi scientific honor society.

In July, I traveled to the UK with my research lab for the IMRF conference in Durham—a meeting devoted entirely to multisensory science. It was the kind of conference where no one needs convincing that perception is embodied, contextual, and relational. Everyone spoke the same sensory language and that made the science feel both rigorous and expansive.

Getting there was part of the experience. The long train ride from the rather chaotic King’s Cross station up to Durham gave the trip a sense of gradual arrival—watching the landscape shift before the intensity of the conference began. The train journey spilled into a small moment of levity—a poem I wrote, “We all live in a multisensory world,” was loosely set to Yellow Submarine and echoing a phrase my PI often repeats. Evenings found their own rhythm: dinners with lab mates (including a Turkish one), narrow alleyways, and dancing at Durham Castle, which still serves as a student dorm at Durham University. Imagine getting to live in a castle.

Durham cathedral itself is hard to stand in without thinking of Harry Potter—so steeped in that imagery that you half expect a spell to echo through the nave. I also saw the Magna Carta—all surviving versions in one place. Impressive, yes, but what also came to mind was a long-running version-control problem. When the guide pointed out how rosaries in portraits were painted over or restored depending on the era, it felt like a visual changelog of belief systems being edited to fit the moment.

After the conference, I spent a couple of quieter days in Kent with the lively Aunty Bessie, who is Tongan, enjoying her stories and updates from Tonga. I needed that shift in pace.

One of the unexpected highlights of the year was serving on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Autism Europe Congress in Ireland in September. It was an honor—but also a reminder of how powerful it is to be in rooms where disability-centered research is treated as foundational, not peripheral. And get to witness how autism is being unfolded in Europe. I’m not the most “social” person in face-face interactions,  but it was  meaningful to meet folks who had been just email voices before.

Outside the conference halls, Ireland itself left an imprint. The grass really does have a special shade of green—and the rainbows don’t arc politely across the sky; they stretch a full 180 degrees, as if insisting on being seen. You half expect a leprechaun to appear at the edge of the light, digging for gold where the rainbow meets the meadow. I also saw the rugged coasts of Northern Ireland, including basalt rock formations believed to be bridges built by giants, and heard tales of Irish and Welsh giants from a tour bus driver who delivered them with complete sincerity, along with the rendering of an Irish ballad “Cockles and Mussels”, of a fishmonger calling out her wares.

Dare I say it: that was my best conference yet. And for once, I wasn’t stressed at all for an entire trip.

2025 continued as a media year. Two pieces in particular traveled further than I expected:

• The Physics of Autistic Inertia
• Do You Grow Out of Autism?

One of the most meaningful milestones was co-writing a book foreword with Dr. Temple Grandin: Unique Journeys, Common Ground in the Autism for Dummies Book. That collaboration mattered to me not just intellectually, but personally. I've grown up hearing her name.

Invited presentations:

• NSF ERVA: Engineering Visioning the Future for Neurodivergence (Vanderbilt)
• UC Berkeley Neurodiversity Symposium (Keynote)
• Teaching two classes on autism research at the Stanford SNP-REACH Summer Program
• Autism Tree Global Neurodiversity Conference (UCTV)
• Chennai & Bangalore autism community events (India)

In November, I traveled to India to see grandma. India trips are always layered. In recent years, several visits have coincided with the loss of grandparents—I’d lost two in close succession—and that changes how you experience time, family, and return. This visit carried that weight too, alongside moments of connection, memory, and grounding.

During that trip, I also visited the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. It was awe inspiring; in the energy of the place, the people, the sheer scale and architectural presence — expansive and enduring. From there, I went on to Varanasi, where I was re-awed by the Ganges. The river is immense—both physically and sensorially—wide, constant, and absorbing everything around it. Both experiences were deeply humbling.

And then December arrived. Quietly. Without fanfare.

I was named an awardee of the SfN Neuroscience Scholars Program.

What stayed with me wasn’t the recognition itself, but what it symbolized. Coming on the heels of last year’s NSF GRFP, along with other awards and the Sigma Xi invitation earlier this year, it felt less like a single moment and more like a steady throughline: that disability-centered neuroscience belongs inside the field, shaping how it moves forward.

If there’s a theme to the year, it’s this: momentum doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it arrives quietly, carrying both grief and growth, and asks you to keep going—with care.

None of this happened in isolation. Whatever worked this year did so because of an ecosystem around me—my superstar research mentors Mark Wallace and Carissa Cascio, my teammates in the Wallace Lab, Keivan Stassun and Tim Vogus at the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation. Their patience, flexibility, and steady support made it possible for me to keep working through challenges that aren’t always visible, and to do work that would not have been possible on my own.

I’m an “awe-tistic neuroscientist” and a writer who loves ideas—but I don’t want ideas to float above people. I’m still learning how to turn knowledge into care, and how to stay curious without losing humility. I’m a thinker with a very intense inner world, I experience the outside world intensely too—and I’m still figuring out how to bridge the two. Disability is messy, and solutions often feel far away. The work continues not because it’s clear, but because it’s necessary.

2025, quietly. 2026, still unfolding.