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News /

Traveling the Globe to Save the Earth

June 10, 2019
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Kevin Tang '18

Fulbright recipient Kevin Tang '18 will further his environmental science studies in Jordan.

“There’s a need for the human race to rethink the way we’ve produced food and clothing and used transportation,” says Kevin Tang. “Scientists can contribute by showing people alternative materials, processes, and technologies”—which is a part of what drives his academic work.

Tang was born and raised in Manhattan. His father, a mail carrier, had come to New York from Vietnam, and the family lived on the border of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Always an outstanding student, Tang went to Stuyvesant, one of the city’s most competitive high schools, and wanted to attend college locally as well. He chose Hunter’s Macaulay Honors College, he says, because “it offered the scholarship funding and personalized advising I didn’t see at the city’s big private universities.”

Despite attending Stuyvesant, known for its advanced STEM curriculum, Tang says he had little exposure to, or interest in, the scientific professions before he came to Hunter. He did know he was interested in fighting social inequity and making the world a better place, and at Hunter he learned to see science as a means toward those ends. He also began to value science for its clear-eyed way of looking at the world.

Tang says he owes his academic focus and professional calling to Hunter’s Spiro Alexandratos, an environmental and polymer chemist. Particularly important, Tang says, was the insight he gained in Professor Alexandratos’s class on the philosophical and scientific views of knowledge, reality, and certainty. He says he was also deeply influenced by Professor Owen Gutfreund’s urban studies class on the struggle for social justice in cities across the U.S. and around the world.

“Scientists can contribute by showing people alternative materials, processes, and technologies.”

Kevin Tang '18

In his junior and senior years, Tang opted to pursue dual majors in urban studies and biochemistry, with a concentration in bioinformatics. He also studied Arabic in Hunter’s highly regarded Arabic Program and spent the summer of 2017 fine-tuning his language skills in Morocco as a U.S. State Department Critical Language Scholar. In 2018 he won the Humanity in Action Fellowship, which took him to the Netherlands right after graduation. There he joined an international group of young scholars and emerging leaders in the study of colonialism, World War II, and post-war struggles for democracy and human rights.

Now he’s back at Hunter as a member of Professor Alexandratos’s lab team, looking for ways to use low-cost, non-toxic materials to capture toxic dyes that pollute the earth’s waters. He’ll do similar work during his Fulbright year at the University of Jordan in Amman, conducting research on the use of locally available porous materials to capture local pollutants.

“I’ll be in a big city, in an Arabic-speaking country, furthering environmental science,” Tang says joyfully of a project that embraces a full range of his interests and ambitions.

Upon his return from Jordan, he’ll decide whether to pursue a PhD in chemistry. He already knows he’ll continue to work on preventing and reversing environmental pollution.

To get expert help with applying for NSF Graduate Research Fellowships and other national awards, Hunter students and graduates should contact The Ruth & Harold Newman Office of Prestigious Scholarships & Fellowships at (212) 396-6910 or ops@hunter.cuny.edu.

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