UC Davis postdoc sees promise in scientist at Ethiopian Institute for Agricultural Research
Gray dies tragically, but her mentoring spirit lives on through memorial contributions
Sara Gebremeskel spends 3 months on campus, also visits Grayâs family in Illinois
This is a story of loss and promise â the loss of a UC Davis researcher, Sharon Gray, and the promise of other female scientists who have her legacy as a source of support.
Young women like Sara Gebremeskel of Ethiopia, who recently had a three-month internship at UC Davis, after having met Sharon in October 2016 at the Ethiopian Institute for Agricultural Research. Sharon was in Ethiopia to assist in the launch of a research project; she was a postdoc, working with Siobhan Brady, associate professor in the Department of Plant Biology.
During that visit, Gray and Brady were riding in a car on the outskirts of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, when a rock crashed through a window, striking and killing Gray. The Netherlands Institute of Ecology, which leads the project that brought the scientists to Ethiopia, attributed Grayâs death to a random act of a few young individuals throwing stones at passing vehicles.
âI knew Sharon for only two days,â said Sara, a research assistant at the National Agricultural Biotechnology Research Center, part of the Ethiopian Institute for Agricultural Research. âShe was easy-going, always smiling, and so energetic and passionate about science like I am, so we got along together very well.â
Sharon was 30 and Sara was 29. âMaybe that helped us to communicate easily,â Sara said. âShe was asking me a lot of questions, and I was, too. She asked me if I wanted to do my Ph.D., the activities I am involved in, my future ambitions. During our tour in the lab, I was telling them the gaps we have, especially on the technical part.â
Sharon saw promise in Sara and was determined to bring her to UC Davis for training.
Scientific exchange
Sharonâs husband, R.J. Cody Markelz, a postdoc in another plant biology lab at UC Davis, set the wheels in motion when he established a GoFundMe account in his wifeâs memory. âThe mission of this current campaign is to make something positive out of this tragedy,â he wrote on the fundraising site, describing âSharonâs idea of bringing a young female Ethiopian researcher to UC Davis for a scientific exchange.â
Tracy Raines, principal investigator with AgBiome USA, who was with Sharon in Ethiopia, filled in the details: âWhen we visited the labs ⦠she was so excited to come back to help train the scientists and to help them use the equipment to which they had access, but were not knowledgeable on using.â
Soon Sharon began talking about bringing Sara to UC Davis. âWhen we left, she gave Sara her contact information, a hug and some kisses on the cheeks,â Raines wrote. âShe saw the eagerness to learn in Sara and that the environment was the only restriction to her education, something she really wanted to help alleviate.â
Donations poured in â from UC Davis and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Sharon did her undergraduate work and received her Ph.D.; and from around the world â honoring Sharon and her dream for Sara. The GoFundMe account quickly amassed more than $100,000.
Spirit of mentoring lives on
Now, a year after Sharonâs death, we can report total contributions of nearly $160,000, all of which has been allocated: to endowed scholarships at UC Davis and the University of Illinois; to a travel award fund at the American Society of Plant Biologists, to enable participation by young female investigators in ASPB meetings; and to help pay for Saraâs internship.
Dealing with all of this, setting everything up, was a difficult task for Markelz on the one hand, but easy on the other, âbecause it was fulfilling something Sharon wantedâ â to assist young women, primarily, in science.
âI just decided that every day I would do something emotionally difficult ⦠rather than putting it off,â he said, knowing that ultimately Sharonâs spirit of mentoring would live on. Read more about Sharon's mentoring.
Markelz and Brady worked together to apply for university funds for the exchange program, garnering support from the Office of Global Affairs, College of Biological Sciences, Department of Plant Biology and the Genome Center. The funding is sufficient to bring one more Ethiopian to UC Davis in the next six months.
âThrough these types of collaborations,â Brady said, âwe can pass on the education and knowledge that Sharon wished to share, and forge stronger connections with Ethiopian scientists as well as understand the problems that they face there.â
âBeautiful and yet bittersweetâ
âSaraâs visit fulfilled one of Sharonâs last wishes,â Brady said. âIt is hard to find the words to adequately express the meaning of this to myself, to my family and to the lab.
âPlease only be assured that it gave me some solace, that it was beautiful and yet bittersweet to see Sharonâs dream come true, but to not have Sharon here to see it.â
Such emotion extended to Sharonâs home state of Illinois, where Sara ventured on her own one weekend, describing it as âthe beautiful part of my stay in the U.S.â â meeting Sharonâs family.
âThey invited me over there to meet them. At first it was scary to think of facing her family, âspecially her mum. But it was something that I really wanted to do.
âI donât have words to express how lucky I am to meet a godly family like them. They embraced me like I am part of the family. ⦠It was so good to know Sharon more, her childhood, who she was, her family, her personality and much more.â
The Gray family is âa model for forgiveness,â Sara said. âThey went out of their way ⦠to bring a positive thing out of the bad situation. It should be a lesson for this cruel world filled with revenge and selfish acts.â
As for Markelz, his fellowship ended in May, and he has started a bioinformatics company, Rev Genomics, âa big data company operating in the plant biotechnology space.â He said he is heartened to know his wife is still contributing to science, even though she is no longer physically here. âA legacy is a powerful thing,â he said.
Applying to grad school in the U.S.
Sara, who did her undergraduate work at Wolaita Sodo University in her home country and earned a masterâs degree from Pan African University of Life and Earth Science (Ibadan, Nigeria), said: âMeeting Sharon indeed changed my life. She saw something that I didnât see in myself. She made me believe in myself.â
Indeed, when previously considering graduate school, she thought U.S. universities would be âtoo much for me.â Now, she said, with the knowledge, experience and confidence she gained at UC Davis, she has changed her mind and is now looking at graduate education in the United States.
âIn Ethiopia, we have good research centers with bunches of researchers, but there are only few people that are trained on analyzing the data generated. I am interested in bridging that gap and training others.â
With her recent visit she already provided an education for Brady and others at UC Davis. âThrough Sara, I learned about the challenges that face Ethiopians and their families, as well as the strong bond of family and your home and ancestral lands,â Brady said. âI learned about the sacrifices that families need to make to feed themselves and that education can often come necessarily second.â
All the more reason Brady is happy to continue her work on the project that Sharon had been a part of â research into eradicating Striga, a parasitic weed, from Ethiopiaâs sorghum crop.
Officially, the project is called Promoting Root Microbes for Integrated Striga Eradication. The acronym is, appropriately, PROMISE â as if the lead researchers had Sharon and Sara in mind when they named it.
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