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.

It’s 8 p.m. on a Monday night in the Phillips Church basement. We greet the assembled group of 45 student listeners with snacks and a positive spirit as we settle in for our “mindful minute,” an intentional activity to center ourselves. As coordinators of the Student Listener Program, we use this biweekly, scheduled meeting time to check in about what’s happening on campus and in the dorms and discuss logistics of an upcoming assembly in which we’ll share information about the role of student listeners on campus. Two seniors, based on their own research and a pre-meeting review with us, then lead a training on the topic of homesickness, complete with a PowerPoint presentation and a Kahoot! exercise to test our knowledge. As the meeting lets out, a few students stay behind to run some hypotheticals by us in an effort to help peers they’re concerned about.

In the face of worry, stress and loneliness, any Exeter student can knock on dorm room doors with the familiar blue signs to talk with a student listener. Rising uppers become listeners through a complex and collaborative process that entails a personal application, faculty recommendation and dorm feedback; trustworthiness, approachability and respect from peers and adults all factor into their selection. Once appointed, student listeners undergo biweekly training throughout the academic year on topics such as anxiety, homesickness, depression, roommate issues, disordered eating, drugs and alcohol, and supporting LGBTQIA+ students. These meetings cover many aspects of the position, including planning events in the dorm and how to appropriately respond to different situations. This dedicated time ensures that listeners are perceived as a “safe outlet” for the dorm as a whole.

It is developmentally appropriate that teenagers when in distress go to peers first, so student listeners are the front-line support networks for students at Exeter. Besides offering private support, they can also connect their peers with appropriate Academy resources. Most issues are kept confidential, unless a student listener believes someone has been harmed or is a danger to oneself or others. Should an issue extend beyond the scope of a peer-to-peer conversation, listeners are trained to reach out to a trusted adult and are supported by on-call counselors at the Lamont Health and Wellness Center, the dean on duty and Campus Safety as needed.

Counseling and Psychological Services collaborates with the Health and Human Development Department to oversee the Student Listener Program. This has been a wonderful partnership, as we weave together our respective disciplines to promote health and wellness on campus. But it’s not strictly business with student listeners, as the students say. We attempt to model living a balanced life. Whether it’s telling jokes, breaking into song or students giving each other shout-outs for their accomplishments in athletics, theater or music, Student Listener meetings have an air of positivity, peace and fun.

On the day of our assembly, we gather onstage in the Assembly Hall, wearing our Student Listener T-shirts. After we speak about our role on campus, we play a short music video of a day in the life of a listener. It’s electric to come together to promote the work we do. As Bruno Mars’ “You Can Count on Me” fills the hall, we hope students take away our guiding principles: When in doubt, reach out. Look for the blue door tag. And never hesitate to knock.