Uploaded April 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago

---

At 11 years old, Mahdi Ramadan was evacuated from Lebanon during political unrest on a US aircraft carrier. As an immigrant child living in Seattle with his family, Ramadan dreamt of attending college to become a neuroscientist like his hero, Oliver Sacks, but didn’t think college was possible for a kid like him. Now, Ramadan is a graduate student in the Jazayeri lab at MIT. So what changed?