Fish Fossils

During my time at Yale, I visited the Peabody Museum and a certain fossil exhibit caught my eye. The fossil was a large palm frond surrounded by fish, all preserved together in a massive slab of stone from Wyoming. The leaves stretched across the rock while the fish appeared to swim around them. It was fascinating that so many fish died so close to the plant. It made me wonder what had happened that caused the fish to die and whether the palm frond was part of the fish’s habitat or home. What surprised me most was how close the fossil had been found to the site I had visited. 

On a family vacation to Yellowstone, I had the chance to travel back in time through fossil digging at the Green River Formation near Kemmerer, Wyoming. I was so excited, imagining that I would crack open rocks and find fish skeletons everywhere. Instead, I learned that I was not old enough to dig at the main fossil site. While my brother happily started digging with my dad at the quarry, I searched through a peripheral area that had already been excavated. The most promising slabs had been broken apart, leaving behind small piles of loose rock. I picked through them anyway, turning over pieces and smashing them with a little hammer. At the time, I still had delusions of success and piles of fish fossils.

After all that searching, the only fossils I found were small pieces of fossilized fish poop, also known as coprolites. They were not exactly the discoveries I had pictured. My brother across the canyon was swimming in fish fossils while I was swimming in their poo. It was no surprise that the fossils we wrapped up and took home were his. The fish now sit framed in my family’s house.

Seeing the museum fossil changed the way I remembered my trip. At the time, I thought I had been unlucky because I had not found a complete fish. Now I know that scientists have used feces to discover amazing things about prehistoric animals. Their poo contains details about their diet and their environment, facts that just a skeleton would not be able to provide. Seeing the dozens of fish frozen in time at the Peabody Museum was a reminder that fossil hunting is not only about finding the most beautiful object. It is about collecting small pieces of evidence, even something as unimpressive as fossilized poop, and using them to imagine a world that no longer exists.

The Peabody Museum

During my time at Yale, I visited The Human Footprint exhibit at the Yale Peabody Museum. The exhibit focuses on how humans and their environment have shaped each other over millions of years. It presents human evolution as a complicated process involving many species, tools, environments, and extinctions. The gallery has replicas of early human fossils and animals our ancestors interacted with. Human evolution isn’t a linear process, it’s composed of many different adaptations appearing in response to our environments.

One part of the exhibit that stood out to me was how much scientists could learn from physical evidence. A skull or tool may seem small, but the details reveal how ancient humans lived. Early human relatives developed traits like walking upright, making tools, and having larger brains, but these adaptations did not appear at the same time. The stone tools were especially interesting because they showed that technology has been part of human survival for millions of years. Today, technology is represented by phones or AI, but the earliest technology was a sharpened stone. Technology has always been a way humans adapt.

The Human Footprint also showed that survival was never guaranteed. Some human relatives lived for millenia but eventually died out. A trait can be useful in one environment but when conditions change, that trait can be disadvantageous. The exhibit connects this idea to the present by diving deeper into how humans are still changing the world. The gallery includes examples like humans contributing to the extinction of giant moa and agriculture changing the genetics of corn. Visiting the exhibit helped me understand human evolution as a story of adaptation to environments. Like Darwin’s observations of small differences in organisms, the exhibit showed that science begins with paying attention to details. 

The Thinking Game

While at Yale Young Global Scholars, I watched the documentary The Thinking Game, which follows Demis Hassabis and DeepMind as they progressed towards breakthroughs in AI. One of the biggest challenges Hassabis and his team encountered was protein-folding. Their solution, AlphaFold, revolutionized research. Scientists went from having a handful of reliable models of proteins to having access to models of every protein imaginable. 

This documentary was especially interesting because I had used AlphaFold before in my own research. I studied the evolutionary relationships between Dipcericin A, Diptericin B, and Diptericin C using phylogenetic trees, and AlphaFold modeling. Before doing this research, I mostly thought of biology and computer science as fields that barely overlapped. However, watching this movie and conducting my own research has taught me that those two fields often help the other advance. In this case, AI transformed research permanently and for the better. 

Research is becoming more interdisciplinary. Biology, computer science, artificial intelligence, and statistics are no longer completely separate fields. In order to study peptides, I utilized programming and AI. Future research will depend on people who can connect different areas of knowledge and scientists will need to understand not only the organism or molecule they are studying, but also the technology being used to study it.

The Thinking Game showed me that AlphaFold represents a larger shift in how scientific research is done. My own project on Diptericin showed me a small example of that shift. By combining biology with technology, I was able to study insect immune peptides in a way that would have been much harder without computational tools. Discoveries like AlphaFold are not just impressive because they use AI, but because they help scientists ask deeper questions about life, evolution, and the structures that make biology possible.

Publishing a Research Paper

After nearly a year of researching, writing, and revising, my research paper, Structural Diversification of Diptericin Antimicrobial Peptides Across Insects, was published in the National High School Journal of Science in May of 2026. The moment that I saw the email from NHSJS confirming my paper was published felt unreal because of all the time and effort I had spent working on it. The most important takeaway that I learned was that writing a paper and publishing one are two very different things. Even after the research itself is complete, there are multiple rounds of editing and revision before the paper is ready to be submitted. It is important to never give up and to always keep your final goal in mind.

One of the most challenging parts of the process was working through reviewer comments. It’s tough thinking your paper is finished and then receiving pages of corrections. Some changes were small, like fixing wording or labels, while others required me to rethink how I explained parts of my analysis. In the end, I spent countless hours relabeling graphs and poring over captions to ensure the final product was my best effort. 

All of my hard work paid off when I emailed in my final manuscript. By that point, I had read through the paper so many times that I knew almost every section by memory. Sending in the final version felt different from earlier submissions because there were no more revisions left to make.

This paper is just the beginning. I want to continue my research in college and beyond. The topic of evolution is fascinating and I would love to dive deeper in topics like biological anthropology. I have always had an interest in humans, and this paper has introduced me to the methods used in evolution research. Without this experience, I would have never known of resources like AlphaFold or learned how to analyze phylogenetic trees. Publishing my first research paper was an amazing experience because it represents months of effort and because it opened a whole new pathway of learning for me. 

Homo sapiens Meets Neanderthals: The End of a World by Harvard Professor Jean-Jacques Hublin

I recently watched a lecture called Homo sapiens Meets Neanderthals: The End of a World by Professor Jean-Jacques Hublin. The focus of the talk was on how Homo sapiens entered Eurasia and interacted with Neanderthals. It was intriguing to see how complicated the process was.

One of the most interesting facts was how long the two groups overlapped. Researchers used to think modern humans entered Europe around 40,000 years ago, but discoveries at Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria and Ranis in Germany revealed that Homo sapiens were present in Europe around 45,000-47,000 years ago. Since Neanderthals were present in parts of Europe until around 40,000 years ago, the two groups may have lived near each other for thousands of years.

The genetic evidence was also fascinating, as most people with ancestry outside Africa carry about 2% Neanderthal DNA. By studying the size of Neanderthal DNA segments, scientists could estimate when interbreeding occurred. Dr. Hublin explained that the main period of mixing likely happened around 45,000 to 49,000 years ago. What was especially interesting was that the size of these gene fragments can give scientists information about how long ago the two populations mixed. As time passes and DNA is passed down through generations, recombination causes the inherited Neanderthal sequences to become increasingly fragmented. Larger Neanderthal DNA sequences therefore suggest more recent mixing between the gene pools, while smaller sequences suggest that the mixing happened further in the past and that the original sequence has been broken into smaller pieces over time. I knew that DNA could reveal that interbreeding occurred, but I did not realize that the size of the fragments could also help scientists estimate when it happened.

My favorite part of the lecture was learning about ZooMS, which stands for Zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry. ZooMS is a technique that identifies tiny bone fragments by analyzing collagen proteins. Most of the bone fragments scientists recover from archaeological excavation sites are from animals, while only a small portion come from humans. This creates a problem because many fragments are too small or damaged to identify just by looking at their shape. ZooMS gives scientists a way to search through large numbers of these fragments and identify the rare human ones.

First, you start by extracting a small sample of collagen from a bone fragment. Then, using enzymes, the collagen is broken down into peptides. A mass spectrometer is used to measure the masses of the different peptides. Different species have characteristic patterns of peptides, almost like a molecular fingerprint. Scientists can compare the pattern from an unknown bone fragment with reference samples to determine which species it came from. This allowed scientists to find human remains that would otherwise be overlooked. Once a fragment is identified as human, scientists can study it further. The fragment can potentially be directly dated, and researchers may also be able to extract DNA from it to learn more about the individual and the population it belonged to. I thought it was interesting that a tiny bone fragment that might initially look unimportant could provide both chronological and genetic information about humans who lived tens of thousands of years ago. I love learning about new techniques, especially those that combine biology and technology.

The lecture changed how I thought about Neanderthal extinction. Their disappearance wasn’t a sudden event, but a long process over 700 years involving migration and interbreeding, with their DNA living on in us. Around 40,000-41,000 years ago, Neanderthals disappeared, replaced by Homo sapiens, but their DNA still lives on, leading to questions about the significance of that 2% most humans carry. What features did that 2% affect that caused it to be passed on so consistently? Where and when did the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens reproduce? Were there other variants of this mix that failed to reproduce? Learning how scientists can connect archaeological remains with genetic evidence made this especially interesting.

Scholastic Art

In 2026, I was awarded two regional Scholastic Art Awards for my digital art. I received a Gold Key for a portrait of my dad called Breaking Through the Noise and an Honorable Mention for a drawing of my grandparents called Look How Far We’ve Come.

Breaking Through the Noise was inspired by a photo of my dad reaching toward the camera while standing on the glass floor at New York City’s SUMMIT One Vanderbilt. The room had mirrored floors, ceilings, and walls, creating a trippy image that looked like it came straight from a fever dream. I liked the idea of my dad breaking away from all of that chaos, hence the title of the piece. The background is crowded with reflections, lights, people, and buildings, while my dad remains at the center.

My Honorable Mention, Look How Far We’ve Come, was a much calmer and more personal piece. It depicts my grandparents sitting at a Chinese restaurant, surrounded by their favorite dishes like Sichuan Boiled Fish and sea cucumbers with mushrooms. They have been together for 55 years, and both grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. My grandpa was sent to work on a farm because he was a college graduate and considered to be over educated. Later, they immigrated to the U.S. and built a new life while keeping their traditions alive.

Those traditions have become part of my childhood. Every Lunar New Year, they give us red envelopes. My grandma often makes dumplings by hand, and on birthdays, we eat long noodles for a long life. The drawing represents not only how far my grandparents have come, but also the family and traditions they have carried with them.

Having both pieces recognized at the regional Scholastic level was especially meaningful because they came from people and moments that are personal to me. The awards reminded me that some of my strongest subjects are already part of my own life.

How a New Species of Ancestors Is Changing Our Theory of Human Evolution

Homo naledi does not fit neatly into the way human evolution is usually explained. The species had a small brain and a flared pelvis, which seem more primitive. But it also had humanlike wrists, long legs, and modern-looking feet. This strange mix of traits was the focus of the TED Talk How a New Species of Ancestors Is Changing Our Theory of Human Evolution by Juliet Brophy.

The first Homo naledi remains were discovered in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa. Researchers recovered around 1,800 fossil specimens from at least 15 individuals. What made the fossils confusing was that different parts of the skeleton seemed like they could have belonged to completely different species. The other fragments were found to be the remains of an unidentified rodent and a bird. Eventually, researchers decided that the combination was unique enough to name a new species.

One of the most intriguing bits about the discovery was the age of the fossils. Based on Homo naledi’s small brain and other primitive features, scientists expected it to be around two million years old. Instead, the fossils were dated to only about 235,000 to 336,000 years ago. This meant that Homo naledi may have lived at the same time as early modern humans in Africa.

The discussion about tool use was also interesting as scientists have often connected larger brains with the ability to make stone tools. Homo naledi had a much smaller brain, but its hands and wrists were similar to those of species known to use tools. Since its fossils overlap in time with stone-tool industries in South Africa, scientists cannot automatically assume modern humans made every tool from that period. The fact that the fossils were found in a cave system creates questions not only about the biology of Homo naledi, but also about their culture. Were the bones in the cave evidence of a burial? Or perhaps they were the last resting place of an elder. Homo naledi’s timeline also raises questions about if they interacted with Homo sapiens. As more discoveries are made, more answers will be found along with many questions.