Meet a New Tar Heel: Logan Amos

“I did want to do something that sort of helped people understand how the world works and help support people’s health and help people understand their health,” said Amos, who wants to focus on cancer and microbiology. Carolina, she said, “is honestly just a great school for that.”

As a child, Amos didn’t know much about her dad’s work. But the way he died sparked her interest in health and medicine.

In 2013, the family went to Europe because the American College of Surgeons had given Dr. Keith Amos an award to study how breast cancer is treated in other countries. In Edinburgh, Scotland, he suffered an aortic dissection — a tearing in the layers of the aortic wall that shares common symptoms with and “mimics how heart attacks work,” Amos said.

“The methods that they were using to help him basically made it worse because when you have a heart attack, the way that you treat it is literally the complete opposite from an aortic dissection,” she said. “He was basically internally bleeding.”

His death happened so quickly that it took the family a while to figure out what happened and come to terms with it.

“It was a lot of being upset with people because, like, why wouldn’t you know how to treat something that’s completely different from a heart attack?” she remembered thinking. “That sort of is what initially got me interested in biology and health in general.”

Discovering her father’s work

Currently living in her native Houston, Amos moved often during her youth. She attended high school at a boarding school in Ohio, where she worked in an on-campus cancer immunology lab. She conducted a project on how nicotine affects cancer growth in non-lung parts of the body and did more research at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi on ways to detect cancer more swiftly.

She felt like she was beginning to find her niche. Then she made a serendipitous discovery when she reviewed an article for her own work and spotted “K.D. Amos” as the author.

“That sort of unlocked something for me,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is so interesting.’ I had no idea that my dad had done this before. That’s when I had really decided that the place that I wanted to be was cancer research.”

This summer, Amos got a jump start on college through the Chancellor’s Science Scholars’ five-week Summer EXCELerator program. Students take classes, go on lab tours, receive professional development and take part in cohort-building activities.

I want to learn more about the body and eventually, maybe, create something that can help others and bring it back to my community.

Locklear spoke about getting into her dream school, what she’s most looking forward to doing at Carolina and what she hopes to bring to the Tar Heel experience.

Why did you decide to come to Carolina?

It’s always been my dream school. When I’ve done summer camps, we went on tours, and I fell in love with the campus and the research labs.

What does it mean to be a Tar Heel?

It’s different than I expected, but I’m excited. I started online, but it’ll be different when I’m on campus and in person. Talking with upperclassmen about their transition helped. I’m looking forward to being able to grow as a person and a student.

What are you most looking forward to in your first semester?

I’m looking forward to sports because I missed out on that in high school. I took classes this summer, so the class part I think I’ll get adjusted to easier, but I’m looking forward to the social aspect of college. I’m also looking forward to stepping out of my comfort zone at Carolina and pushing my limits so I can grow.

What do you hope to bring to the Carolina community?

A sense of diversity. A big part of me is my culture, so maybe joining a group for my culture and spreading more information about it. I’m Native American — I’m Lumbee — and I feel like a lot of people don’t really know about Native Americans.

How have you participated with your culture in the past?

I started beading. We make our own earrings. I’m trying to get back into that. I took a few dance classes, but I didn’t stick with it. I like going to pow-wows and stuff. I know they have those on campus, so I’ll be volunteering and helping with those.

What do you hope to achieve through the Chancellor’s Science Scholars program?

I just want to be able to find my purpose within STEM, being a woman and being able to feel like I’m successful in my field and career. I think after graduation, I want to continue working in a research lab.

Story courtesy of UNC.edu.

“What do you want to do when you grow up?”

When I was young I disliked that question: “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I was curious about everything, and I didn’t want to settle on one subject.

When I got an undergraduate degree in astrophysics and decided to go on to graduate school in astronomy, I was still in search of a way to study everything — the whole universe. When my first serious research project took me to the telescopes at McDonald Observatory, I found a passion for the gears, the grease, and the glass that extend our sight deep into the heavens, and I later came to Carolina to help build instrumentation that now measures the composition of crushed-up exoplanets as they fall onto burned-out stars.

But I did not lose my interest in everything else, and am excited every year to meet students at Carolina who are passionate about learning, both in the classroom and outside. The most interesting questions are still the ones science alone cannot answer. Who made all this? Why is it here? What are we supposed to do in it? For the eternally curious, the answers unfold over a lifetime, but the searching and learning are never more intense than in the four years spent as an undergraduate.

Carolina students like to read and think deeply, and they are ready for challenging ideas.

I try to contribute to this in the classroom by incorporating the humanities, especially history, into my work. Outside the classroom I am very open about my Christian faith and the ways in which I find it not only compatible with science but preceding it and standing under it.

I am delighted to live and work in a the great public university where students and faculty ask big questions and seek answers that are genuine and truthful.

Written by Dr. Chris Clemens, Senior Associate Dean for Research and Innovation