Walking into the Office of Multicultural Affairs on the ground floor of Jeremiah Smith Hall, my senses were immediately delighted by the smell of sweetgrass and delicious Three Sisters Soup and cornbread provided by the dining hall. Images of Maciah Stasis tattooing a woman’s face and of gorgeous works of white and purple quahog shell jewelry were projected on a TV screen.

The Indigenous Reconciliation Club (IRC) and OMA had invited Stasis, a Herring Pond Wampanoag wampum worker, tattooist, regalia maker, story-teller and singer-dancer to campus to give two workshops and celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day. She was seated at the head of the Harkness table and engaged in deep discussion. As co-head of the IRC, it filled me with joy to see faculty and students packed around the table to learn from Stasis.

She began by telling us a bit about herself. We learned that she is a citizen of the Herring Pond Wampanoag tribe, and was born in the land of her ancestors, Plymouth, Massachusetts, where she graduated from Plymouth North High School. Since the age of 15, she has been educating others about her people, delivering keynote addresses at a number of museums and other Indigenous events throughout the U.S. and Canada. Interestingly, she had just returned from a traditional tattooing conference in Canada, where she learned from Inuit tattooists, whose tattooing customs have remained more intact than those of Northeastern Indigenous nations in the U.S.

She shared many details about her work as a wampum jeweler. The quahog clam used to make wampum is endemic to the waters around the Wamapanoag’s land and is believed to be a gift to the Wampanoag as it existed nowhere else. Wampum was greatly valued by Northeastern tribes, and the Wampanoag traded it with surrounding tribes such as the Haudenosaunee, who used it to create treaty belts, among other items. In addition to a form of currency, wampum was and is made into jewelry. Stasis said the work is laborious but worth it. Her pieces include rings, necklaces, bracelets and carvings of wildlife. But, she warned, the dust shed by quahog shells is toxic and has been known to kill ill-prepared artisans.

Stasis then spoke on quillwork, a rare and complicated form of art that uses the quills of porcupines. Quillwork predates beadwork and is used to ornament regalia in much the same way. It is painstaking: Make one mistake and you have to start over, even after multiple hours, or days, of work.

Last, she spoke about her story and process as an Indigenous poke tattooist. She said that tattooing is practiced around the world, and the most common and ancient form is stick-and-poke. This refers to using a sharp needle, or thorn, to insert pigment such as soot into the skin. The method was used across the continent, including in the Wampanoag Nation. Although the custom varied from nation to nation, tattoos generally marked events like childbirth, ages, deaths and accomplishments. But this practice has been suppressed and vilified throughout the history of our country; as a result, few Indigenous cultures continue to practice traditional tattooing.

I learned that Stasis, who has tattooed herself and others for a variety of reasons, is truly a trailblazer in revitalizing this important cultural custom. She says the process is extremely intimate and exhausting, and emphasizes the importance of the environment, the energy and the tattooist during the procedure.

By the end, all of us around the table were brimming with questions, which Stasis answered. She gave each of the attendees a small satchel that contained part of a quahog shell, cedar, deer sinew and sweetgrass, each of which provides protections and properties, she said. I left with a wealth of knowledge and a deep sense of gratitude. This was a truly transformative and mind-expanding event unlike any other I’ve attended in my time at Exeter, and I am extremely grateful for the knowledge Stasis shared, and the space she created in OMA that day.

— Daniel Connelly ’25 is a proctor in the Office of Multicultural Affairs and co-head of the Academy’s Indigenous Reconciliation Club.

This article was first published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Thomas Ehrlich ’52 has served in the administrations of six U.S. presidents — including as the first president of the Legal Services Corporation and the first director of the International Development Cooperation Agency, reporting directly to President Jimmy Carter. He was also dean of Stanford Law School, provost of the University of Pennsylvania and president of Indiana University.

He has authored, co-authored or edited 15 non- fiction books, written two novels and is finishing a third, Jewels.

We spoke with Ehrlich, 91, about his memoir, Learn, Lead, Serve: A Civic Life, released in December.

You talk about mentorship throughout the book. Is there one mentor who had the largest impact on you?

My father. We were as close as father and son could be — we skied together, played together, read novels together. I can still remember reading The Once and Future King with him. He was always there, always supporting me and a model of what a father, a husband and a caring civic person should be. Other mentors have had a shaping influence on my life including Judge Learned Hand, for whom I was a law clerk, and Under Secretary of State George W. Ball, for whom I was a special assistant during the escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

You tell a story about your grandmother giving you a biography of Louis Brandeis, an attorney and associate justice of the Supreme Court. Did that shape your decision to use your abilities for the public good?

Yes, I still have that blue-bound copy of that biography. Brandeis was a great public servant in the best sense. And service was an important part of Exeter for me as well. In my memoir, I call Exeter my ‘best education’, and that’s not hyperbole. Harvard and Harvard Law School were wonderful, but Exeter and the dedication of the teachers 24/7 to their students, of whom I was privileged to be one, was just amazing and transformative for me. Non sibi was at the core, and that really shaped me — it shaped my sense of who I am, how I want to relate to the world around me. I think of the times when I have had the good fortune to be involved in public service, and I really owe much of that to Exeter. This is what Exeter expected of us as students — to think not just about ourselves, alone — and that’s just the way you behaved. When you learn that and behave that way, or try to at least, as an adolescent, it’s built into your character as you grow up and grow older.

It seems like Exeter shaped you emotionally, as well as intellectually.

It did very much, yes. Intellectually, it certainly did in history and in English. We wrote a lot and I’m still writing now. I’m 91 years old, and here I am, writing away, working on my third novel. Exeter is where I learned to read and write, to write and enjoy.

For your Harvard thesis, you researched a survey of family farmers that was done by the Department of Agriculture. You say it was an early awakening for you to the importance of public policy shaped by public opinion. How does it frame the way you look at what’s happening in our country today?

I’m deeply disturbed by what’s happening now. The Trump administration’s assault on our democracy is terrifying. I taught for many years a course called “Democracy in Crisis” at Stanford, so I’m familiar with past crises. And of course, we did have a civil war. This is not a civil war, but I am devastated by seeing what’s happening in terms of an elected president seeking to destroy much of the social fabric of our country, as well as its leadership in the world. Since I oversaw the Agency for International Development, its destruction is a particular blow to me. Millions of people are dying because of that action.

Do you see a future way of managing our way out of this?

I have hope. I quote one of my professors, Sam Huntington at Harvard, who wrote a terrific book American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. He ends by saying,“Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideal. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” I have hope. I believe we will have a pendulum that swings back toward the middle, that those in Congress will say, “We’ve got to stand up and stop what’s happening.” But the carnage that’s happening
— America’s place in the world will never be the same.

In your many roles in six administrations, was there one in particular that has stayed with you?

Well, they all stay with me. But the one that shaped me most was the Legal Services Corporation, because when I became dean at Stanford Law School, I had no real idea that 40-plus million poor people had no access to justice. It concerned me, which is why I thought, “If I can have a chance to do something about that, I want to do it.” I spent three-plus years listening to poor people all over the country, hearing their stories of how a crisis would happen if they didn’t get a Social Security check or got evicted, and how important it was to have a lawyer, and what a difference that person could make by listening and devoting their lives to helping poor people. That also shaped my approach to others less fortunate and my character.”

You’ve become particularly focused on instilling young people with awareness around community service, public service and civic learning. Do you think that that’s our most hopeful way forward?

I do. I think it’s essential. That has been my passion since the mid-’80s when I was at the University of Pennsylvania, but it’s certainly increased in that the only significant organizations outside of the universities that I’ve helped to run are ones dedicated to preparing college students to be actively, responsibly engaged in public policy and politics. If we don’t do a better job of that, we’re going to suffer more. It’s important not just to serve in a community kitchen, but to ask: “What public policy changes are needed so that community kitchens are no longer necessary?”

— Daneet Steffens ’82 is a books-focused journalist. She has contributed to the Bulletin since 2013.

This article was first published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

If we could peek inside someone’s mind, what would we see? Jeffrey Augustine Songco gives us a glimpse. His immersive work Society of 23’s Conservatory, which recently concluded a two-month run at Lamont Gallery, offers a tangible stream of consciousness for visitors to ponder. It is a conservatory in the greenhouse sense, replete with living foliage, but the plants are only one element of a multisensory installment that explores Songco’s complicated relationship between his identity as an American of Filipino ethnicity and U.S. colonization of the Philippines for a half-century.

The Society of 23 comprises a fictional brotherhood of 23 mysterious gentlemen, all portrayed by the artist — a play on Songco’s days in a fraternity as an under-graduate at Carnegie Mellon University.

The installment was host to several PEA visiting classes and served as one of the workshops in the Academy’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day programming.

Songco says: “My artwork is a celebration of life. I work with a variety of media including large-scale installation, self-portrait photography, sculpture and video. My practice is rooted in a considered set of conceptual parameters that guide my thought and labor towards the final outcome of my autobiographical artwork. I share my reflections on how my mind and body are shaped by the identities and realities I have inherited and constructed myself. This dense layering of things reveals the forest of ideas I navigate and the conflicts I continue to resolve. Each of my artworks relate to one another in particular ways and evolve in their meaning as I continue to create the grand nonlinear narrative of my life.”

This article was first published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

For parents of children with autism, hope is everything, but it can be tough to come by. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has remained a chronic ailment since its conceptualization in the early 20th century. A definitive cause is still unknown, and few options exist to treat the one in every 36 children in the U.S. living with autism. The diagnosis can be heartbreaking.

But Dr. James Adams ’80 is working hard to give the autism community a reason for hope. As director of the Autism/Asperger’s Research Program at Arizona State University, Adams has spent the last 25 years pioneering research with a focus on the disorder’s biological causes and treatments. His determination was born of his own despair after his oldest daughter’s autism diagnosis in 1994.

“It was just devastating,” Adams says. “To be told that she had a lifelong, incurable condition. At age 2½, she had an IQ of 32. She had no spoken language and did not respond to her name. We were told that it was just a matter of time until we would have to place her in an institution. They knew nothing.” Adams, an accomplished materials engineer, had spent his career solving environmental problems: designing solar cells and fuel-efficient car engines. “Nothing you can do” was not good enough for him. He believed there must be a way to improve his daughter’s life.

Around 2000, Adams’ wife attended conferences that explored what were, at the time, more radical ideas like nutritional therapy for managing ASD symptoms, which include health, social and behavioral challenges, as well as significant gastrointestinal problems.

“I thought, we’ve known about vitamins for 50 years,” Adams says. “How could it be possible that kids with autism could be deficient in vitamins?” But once he read the research, he understood the potential. This became the framework for his first study, designed to gauge vitamin deficiencies in children with autism.

Five more studies followed, with great success. Adams then used the results to formulate a comprehensive multivi-tamin and mineral supplement that would improve the nutritional status of autistic children. In 2015, he founded the Autism Nutrition Research Center, a non-profit dedicated to pioneering research in dietary and nutritional support for ASD. The organization now distributes his supplement, called ANRC Essentials, around the world.

“It is not a cure,” Adams says. “But it helps about three-quarters of them in many ways, including improved language, cognition and social interaction.”

Through those early studies, Adams zeroed in on the gut microbiome-brain connection. “We’ve discovered now that more than 80 percent of kids with autism have serious bacterial and/or yeast infections in their gut that could last for years, even decades,” Adams says. “These infections produce toxins — such as paracresol, a bacterially derived metabolite — that affect not just gut symptoms but brain and body function by poisoning the key neurotransmitters, like dopamine and serotonin, involved in mood, learning and memory. It has been truly revolutionary. I won’t say it’s the cause of autism, but I will say it is a major contributing factor.”

What Dr. Adams cannot say just yet, but what the autism community is eager to find out: Could these bad gut bacteria, somehow introduced to a baby’s microbiome during birth, be one reason autism develops in a segment of the population? And could these toxins also be contributing factors for other ailments that develop later in life like Parkinson’s disease, or mood disorders like anxiety and depression?

“We know that when you administer these toxic metabolites to mice, it causes autistic symptoms,” Adams says. “But when you treat the mice with microbiotic transplants from a healthy mouse, it cures them.”

His team has been doing human trials of Microbiota Transplant Therapy (MTT). As of March, four clinical trials had been run, with the fifth and sixth under way.

MTT involves taking gut bacteria from super-healthy donors, purifying it, and giving it to children with autism in either pill or capsule form. Adams describes it as akin to taking a probiotic, except a probiotic typically has only a few species of gut bacteria; MTT provides more than 400 — all the species that would be present in a healthy gut, Adams says.

“We’ve seen 80 percent reductions in gastrointestinal problems — diarrhea, constipation, pain, reflux,” Adams says, “and major improvements in core autism symptoms such as language, social interactions and behavior.”

Parents report that their children are happier, with a reduction in the anxiety, irritability and depression that often come with autism. A federal grant allowed Adams to repeat the study with adults who have had gastrointestinal and autism symptoms for 20, 30, 40 years. Their improvements were similar, Adams says.

In 2023, Adams co-founded Gut-Brain Axis Therapeutics Inc. to achieve Federal Drug Administration approval of MTT. The company is funded by more than 80 families — parents and grandparents of autistic children and adults who believe progress is possible. They need to raise $20 million for one final study.

In January, Adams’ gut-toxin research led to the release of a urine test for diagnosing autism, produced by Autism Diagnostics LLC, a commercial company he founded. Viable for children as young as 2, it measures the amount of toxic metabolites present in a sample. The test is awaiting F.D.A. approval in the U.S. but is available through a firm based in the U.K.

Adams is still pushing for progress, but he has found peace at home with his wife and three children.

“What matters really for people is not how successful we are financially or intellectually,” he says. “But are you happy with your life? Do you enjoy the work you do? My daughter is able to do meaningful work. She is a very loving person. What matters most to me is her health and happiness.”

This article was originally published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

Computer Science

Senior Builds Laptop From Scratch

What started as “betcha can’t” on a team bus trip to a squash match turned into a yearlong passion project for Byran Huang ’25. After accepting a teammate’s challenge to build a computer from scratch, he says he spent “a couple thousand” hours meticulously planning, building and testing nearly every element of his custom open-source laptop. Huang calls it anyon_e.

“I thought about all the projects I’d done in the past — building circuit boards, power systems and data systems,” he says. “This felt like a capstone to all that, a magnum opus.”

Huang parlayed his pursuit into a sanctioned senior project, receiving support from the Academy. He worked extensively in the Design Lab in the Phelps Science Center and spread his materials in the back of Steyer Distinguished Professor Brad Robinson’s physics classroom. “I received amazing funding,” Huang adds. “I blew my budget two and a half times over and nobody batted an eye. The school was constantly there to support me.”

It was important to Huang not only that his laptop be fully functional, but also that his process was easy for others to replicate. “This is a time when technology is innovating so fast, but people don’t get access to how to create things openly,” he says. “I wanted to go on this journey to publish everything I had made for the world to share.”

Huang produced a YouTube video, “How I Made a Laptop From Scratch – anyon_e,” detailing every step of his building process. Among the more than 1 million views was a Neuralink engineering lead who recruited Huang to intern with the Robot Surgery Electrical Engineering team this summer.

Like any good scientist, Huang is taking what he learned from this experience and hoping to refine the process. “I’m really looking forward to building a second version of this laptop that’s affordable,” he says. “Something you can build in your house from scratch.”

Huang is quick to credit the Academy as an inspiration, saying, “Exeter has always been this place that I’ve felt has magical powers to push you to discover more you didn’t know you were capable of doing.”

— Adam Loyd and Sarah Pruitt ’95 are staff writers for The Exeter Bulletin.

This article was originally published in the spring 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

In 1973, English Instructor Peter Greer brought his Outdoor Challenge physical education class to a rock ledge, explained how to rappel, then asked for a volunteer to go first. Jamie Waller’s hand went up immediately. “I was always a risk taker,” Waller ’75 says. “I always had to climb to the top of the tree.”

Waller points to that Exeter course focusing on limit-testing activities including orienteering and solo hiking as the genesis of his lifelong can-do attitude. That energy fueled his successful 25-year career as a fintech executive and second calling to devote his time and resources to helping others. In 2008, Waller, a father of two adult children, founded Cadaniño, a nonprofit that offers aid to special needs orphans in Guatemala City — a decision he made only a year after he had first set foot in the country. He has called Guatemala home ever since.

Over time, Cadaniño has broadened its scope. The free after-school program now serves 250 children ages 7 to 18 at two community centers that offer academic tutoring in STEM subjects, access to computers and a lending library — a rarity in the sprawling city of 7 million. It employs neighborhood teachers who are given access to financial support for continuing education.

“We want to increase a thirst and a desire to learn,” Waller says. Most participants visit three times a week and are welcome to continue so long as they stay in school. “We don’t have a Harkness table, but we do align with concepts of self-development and self-motivation in the sense that the kids decide when and how they advance. They learn to type and use a mouse, and then Word, PowerPoint and Excel. There are kids who even start programming in Python and C++.”

Cadaniño’s efforts have positively affected post-middle school dropout and low literacy rates. Many participants have graduated from high school and some have gone on to college. Others have found employment with a local tech company. Although the organization is ministry-based, it has no religious requirements. Waller says the “nones” are the biggest group in terms of religion, but everyone is offered Bible classes, and older participants can take part in a local mission program, bringing food to shut-ins.

During COVID, Cadaniño sent home not only weekly assignments, but also food. Ensuring that program participants have at least one meal a day is a tradition that has endured. It’s part of a holistic approach to help children gain a “sense of opportunity,” Waller says.

Waller followed his brother, William ’73, to Exeter, where he played water polo, dabbled in theater and spent a semester in Barcelona improving his Spanish skills. After taking time off, he landed at Syracuse University, where he was an English major and fiction editor of the Syracuse Review.

Rejected by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, despite letters of recommendation from fellow writers Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver, Waller headed to New York City after graduation. There he reconnected with classmate and friend Jay Whipple III ’75, founder of Security APL. Early Internet pioneers, they were the first to facilitate a trade over the public internet. In 1996, they sold the company to CheckFree, where Waller stayed until 2001.

It’s an easy date for him to remember: His office was on the 42nd floor of 7 World Trade Center, which collapsed after the twin towers fell on 9/11. Though he was at Citibank at the time, he later returned to CheckFree to run three turn-around companies. When the 2008 recession hit, he was ready to start over.

Waller says that his business background keeps Cadaniño a “tight ship financially,” with accountability and transparency always top of mind. The future includes developing ideas to share the curriculum and best practices with other community centers, a concept Waller calls “Cadaniño in a box.” But for Waller, who personally gifts new laptops to the top two students in the program each year, relationships are most important. “You want to work with each kid and treat them as an individ-ual,” he says, “and eventually you want to reach all children.”

This article was originally published in the Winter 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.

It was the paper as much as anything that really just lit me up,” Tiffanie Turner ’88 says of the Italian crepe paper that inspired her to begin making craft flowers in 2013. At the time, she was a practicing architect raising two young children and in search of materials to make a flower crown for a dance class she was taking in San Francisco. Discovering the delicate paper was a creative awakening.

“I started having epiphany after epiphany,” she says. “‘What if I built a big, peony-shaped piñata?’ Then I thought, ‘What if I hang this peony on the wall, and don’t bash it with a bat?’”

Turner had spent 15 years as an architect after graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. Prior to that, she attended the Academy, where she studied architecture with Art Instructor Nick Dawson. But now, flowers were all she could think about.

“I don’t think I had really ever given myself permission to be outwardly creative,” Turner says. “At first, making flowers was something to do when the kids were asleep. Then I began to feel that, wow, I could do this every single day for the rest of my life.”

Encouraged by her husband, David, she began applying her engineering skills to a new end: capturing the beauty, intricacy and intrinsic hope found in flowers.

Today, Turner’s dramatic creations adorn walls from coast to coast, including in her dining room in West Marin County, California, and the homes of art collectors and galleries. She has had several solo exhibitions in San Francisco and Massachusetts, and in 2017 published a book of her techniques, The Fine Art of Paper Flowers. She also regularly travels abroad to teach flower-making during residential retreats in France and the U.K.

This past fall, three of Turner’s large, statement-making flower sculptures were part of an exhibit called “GROW” at the Palo Alto Art Center. In one install-ment, two 3-foot-wide pink roses hung on the wall, one freshly budding and one with wilting petals, joined by three blue ribbon bows. Titled Soup to Nuts, it speaks to the stages of marriage over a lifetime, from the fresh, hopeful beginnings to the very end.

Turner says she “uses the accessibility of flowers to invite people in,” then incorporates natural irregularities through decay, wilt, dormancy and death to challenge viewers with ruminations on the human condition, ephemerality or the state of the environment. This creative process begins with a distinct conceptual moment.

“I’ll find a flower that I’m dying to make — some just speak to me,” she says. “Then I think: ‘What do I want to talk about? What does this flower remind me of?’ It’s a superimposition of concept, then flower, sometimes color and then form.”

Constructed primarily from papier-mâché, wood or metal rods, cardboard and glue, with layers of exotic crepe paper stained or dyed in natural hues, the blooms are arresting. With each petal deftly textured, colored and carefully draped into position, they are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing — but on an enormous scale. Turner emphasizes that the great unseen material in all her pieces is patience. “Each large-scale sculpture takes two to four months of around-the-clock work to complete,” she says. “There’s no immediate gratification in what I do.”

Finding enough time is always a challenge. By securing grants, selling her work and teaching, Turner has been able to afford the time to keep developing her art. In 2021, a $25,000 grant from the Pirkle Jones Fund helped her build a body of work over two and a half years. She named the collection “American Grown,” and mounted a show in the fall of 2023 at her home gallery in San Francisco, Eleanor Harwood. It then moved to Saint Joseph’s Arts Foundation in early 2024. A career milestone, the exhibit explored themes of generational differences and American exceptionalism.

Turner is currently plotting her next exhibit. “Conceptually, I have a lot of ‘old work’ that I still want to do before I can move on to new ideas,” she says. “There is just an unbelievable amount of material to plumb, because there are so many beautiful flowers out there. And so many issues to talk about.”

This article was originally published in the Winter 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.