Yalini Wijesundara stared at the air gun sitting in her lab.
Her lab director, Jeremiah Gassensmith, had built it in a spur of pandemic-induced boredom, shooting table salt around his home office. Once lockdown ended, he brought it to his biochemistry lab and asked Wijesundara to find a research purpose for it.
Wijesundara, then a first-year graduate student at the University of Texas at Dallas, had just moved to Texas from Sri Lanka. She felt like a fish out of water, still figuring out how the lab worked. Take your time, Gassensmith told her. You’ll figure it out.
