Give a big round of applause to Oberlin’s 2024 Nexial Prize winner: Haoyuan Gao ’24, a biology and neuroscience double major with minors in book studies, chemistry, and East Asian studies! At Oberlin, Gao conducted independent honors research with Associate Professor of Neuroscience Christopher Howard, using fiber photometry to study the interactions between striatal patches and midbrain dopamine neurons and their roles in locomotor function, reward prediction, and action selection. He also studied the polymerization mechanisms of a bacterial tubulin-homologous protein TubZ with Associate Professor of Biology Laura Romberg. Gao’s research and studies also focused on the East Asian rare book collections in Oberlin’s Terrell Special Collections, encompassing things like cataloging and scanning Chinese rare books and using the Mary A. Ainsworth Collection of Illustrated Japanese Books. “As a STEM major student with interest in arts and humanities, I used to think that it was hard to...