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Six outstanding seniors share stories of their U-M careers >
As a teenage poet and playwright, Eric Mills thought his future lay in creative writing.
Then his older sister Laura, born with a rare heart defect, died from complications of pacemaker surgery. Propelled by the memory of his sister and inspired by his mother, a special education teacher, Mills began exploring biomedicine, focusing on medical disabilities.
Majoring in neuroscience at U-M, he signed on to do undergraduate research with assistant professor Haoxing Xu in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. In the Xu lab, Mills became involved in a project on a neurodegenerative disorder called Type IV mucolipidosis (ML4), which affects children and causes a suite of symptoms including mental retardation, poor vision and diminished motor abilities.
The Xu group recently discovered that a glitch in the ability move iron around in cells may underlie ML4, as well as other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and Mills was a coauthor on a paper the research team published on the finding in the prestigious journal Nature.
“It’s been really exciting to go from wanting to be involved in medicine to making a legitimate contribution to a specific field that I have both personal and professional interest in,” says Mills, 22, of Sterling Heights.
After graduation, Mills will enter a program at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in which he will earn medical and doctorate degrees and prepare for a career as a physician-scientist. But that creative kid who wrote poems and plays hasn’t completely been left behind.
Mills keeps poetry books on his bookshelf in the Xu lab (Ezra Pound is his current favorite) and sees parallels between poetry and his chosen profession.
“Pound’s work is irritatingly difficult and obscure, and 95 percent of the time you have no idea what he’s talking about. But if you persist, you’ll find the most beautiful combinations of words, and that’s enough to hook you,” says Mills. “Similarly, when I read scientific papers, I constantly look for ideas and try to connect the dots, and most connections turn out not to be true, simply because nature doesn’t exist to make our scientific ideas successful. But those rare times when an idea turns out to be right are enough to keep me going.”
