Scientists of Many Talents Showcase Their Artistic Skills

Growing up in South Jamaica, Queens, Brianna Rachelle Francis (pictured above) had two early loves: science and music. She vividly remembers her 4th grade teacher Mrs. Philipe asking her and her classmates to draw themselves as scientists and then Francis drawing an older version of herself with curly hair and a lab coat on. 

“When I look back, I realize that I fit that description pretty well in the present day,” Francis says. “Mrs. Philipe had this saying: ‘you are all scientists.’ It meant so much to me to hear that from a Black woman and scientist.”

Francis also vividly remembers getting her own guitar as a gift from her great aunt the Christmas after she started participating in a new guitar club at her school. “It’s pink with white flowers, and I still play it when I have time,” she recalls. “For our elementary school talent show, I performed ‘The A-Team’ by Ed Sheeran.” She would go on to perform in high school as a choral singer  and guitar player and is part of The Sirens, an all-treble a cappella group at Johns Hopkins where she is an undergraduate studying molecular and cellular biology.

Despite this combined love of science and music carrying with Francis throughout her life, she was pleasantly surprised to be able to bring those interests together as an Amgen Scholar at Yale this past summer, participating in a talent show with her cohort. Every year, the Yale Amgen Scholars Program invites its scholars to showcase their artistic talent by designing a T-shirt to represent their cohort, as well as to perform with each other and some of their graduate student mentors. 

“The fact that there was an arts portion of our Amgen Scholars Program was quite surprising to me,” Francis says. “I’ve participated in two research summer programs previously, and neither had a day like this where we could express ourselves artistically. It was definitely one of the most memorable parts of the summer.”

While Francis performed “Locked Out of Heaven” by Bruno Mars as a solo act, others performed in group acts, like Etienne Atangana, who played saxophone in a peer mentor group with graduate students for the song, “Somebody That I Used to Know.” Atangana, who has played saxophone for about 10 years, remembers how excited his peers were when he pulled out the instrument to play. 

“It was cool to see how many of us actually had talents that were outside of science,” Atangana says. “And it was just cool to see that we’re well rounded individuals. While most of us have plans of going into grad school along this narrow, focused trajectory, it was good to see that so many of us, even some of the grad students, had other interests.”

For Atangana, a junior at the University of Miami, the talent show was a memorable highlight in a program that solidified his interests in pursuing scientific research, specifically in neuroscience. When he was growing in Chicago, Atangana aspired to be an NBA player, but in 11th grade, he pivoted to science after some period of not being sure what he wanted to do — conjuring in his head a vision of a “mad scientist” working alone in a laboratory, an appealing image to him at the time, though he now realizes there are many other ways to be a scientist. 

Knowing so young that he wanted to pursue science has been advantageous, he says, allowing him to more fully explore research experiences, like Amgen Scholars and to see the collaborative nature of science. “Being around people that have that same big goal has confirmed and reassured me that this is a good thing that I’m doing,” he says.

Those community aspects were also pivotal to Rachel Pham’s experiences as a Yale Amgen Scholars in 2023. Like Atangana, she left the program feeling even more confident in her path, to become an immunologist. 

A senior at the University of California, Berkeley, studying psychology, Pham was actively involved in designing the T-shirt for her Amgen Scholars cohort, complete with snippets from everyone’s lab work, like DNA and frog embryos. She also participated in two acts, one making balloon animals and another a skit based on Shrek. “All these activities made me realize that it’s totally possible to engage in such a rigorous program while having fun and showing off your personality, whether it’s through a t-shirt design or being the gingerbread man in a Shrek play,” Pham says. 

Growing up in the Bay Area, Pham always had a passion for science that was especially fueled by a curiosity about her father’s disability, which she later discovered was polio. “The realization that vaccines existed, but no cure, intrigued me and led to my pursuit of research, including through the Amgen Scholars Program where I studied immunology,” she says.

And like Francis, art has also been a constant in her life, inspired by her grandfather, who was both a pastor and a painter in Vietnam. “His ability to balance two very different passions resonated with me, and I’ve even won a few art competitions at my church,” she says.

All three Yale Amgen Scholars think back on the arts portion of their program as an integral way of creating community for them as they pursued their summer research. “These activities allowed our cohort to form deeper bonds with one another and allowed us all to destress outside of the lab,” says aspiring physician-scientist Francis. “I still reminisce with my cohort members about the time we all sang ‘I Can’t Stop Singing’ from the Teen Beach movie and somehow won prizes for a group performance.”