Here’s something you might not expect to hear from a bright N.C. A&T senior who’s planning to pursue a doctorate in biological systems engineering:
School, said Onnr Grogan, is hard.
School means spending up to 10 hours four days a week in a second-floor lab in Carver Hall tending to her research. It’s running from the lab to class and back again to turn on pumps, adjust tubes and collect data for her Undergraduate Research Scholars Program project.
For Grogan, a 2022 summa cum laude graduate in biological engineering, in the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, school means undertaking a second research project to fulfill the terms of a scholarship. It’s tackling all of this high-level work while recovering from a traumatic injury that shattered her body and erased two months of her memory.
In September 2019, Grogan was crossing East Market Street on the way to class when a car slammed into her. The impact shattered her leg, fractured her collarbone and left her with a traumatic brain injury. Grogan was rushed to Moses Cone Hospital in life-threatening condition. After two weeks in intensive care, she was transferred to Wake Medical Center in Raleigh, her hometown, and spent most of that fall regaining skills and undergoing speech, occupational and physical therapy.
She remembers learning to stand and walk from a wheelchair, to shower by herself and to form the numbers 1-6.
“I remember my mom teaching me how to use a fork again,” she said.
Grogan spent two and a half months in the hospital and missed an entire year of school. Her body has completely healed, but her emotional and cognitive rehabilitation continue.
“Most of society doesn’t understand what it means to have had a traumatic brain injury,” she said. “You look and seem like a normal person in so many ways, but then, I’d have an emotional outburst, or a period of depression. It’s as though I didn’t fully process the accident until after I came home.”
Throughout the process, Grogan recalled several certainties: She loved school; she was passionate about her major; and she wanted to return to campus, her projects and her coursework.
As she recuperated, Grogan said a hospital staff member once asked her about what she was looking forward to most. Her reply: “I said, I want to go to class. I’m a nerd,” she said with a laugh.
Grogan returned to Greensboro in fall 2020. Her A&T family rallied around her, she said, and Niroj Aryal, Ph.D, her academic advisor and advisor on both research projects, has been “amazing.”
“We’re all one big family,” Grogan said. “After my accident, the school just treated me like family. I didn’t remember who had come to see me, and I didn’t know that the departments had been communicating about my status since my accident, but it makes me very happy that they did. It’s so sweet to know that they were there, and that they had been checking in with me and my mom, and helping her.”
Back on campus, Grogan jumped right back into class and into her undergraduate research scholars project.
For the past two years Grogan has worked to determine the best frequency and duration for applying wastewater to soil to filter out nitrates. In too high concentrations, these nitrogen-based compounds can harm aquatic life and sicken people, especially babies, who drink nitrate-contaminated water.
Grogan’s research consisted of pumping or pouring synthetic wastewater into PVC columns filled with dirt and measuring the contaminants in the leachate. Her preliminary findings suggest that the optimal land application of wastewater is four days a week for 12 hours at a time. She said her data could be important to municipal treatment plants looking for more sustainable methods to reduce harmful pollutants.
Grogan also is hard at work on a second research project. This one’s for the N.C. Composting Council, which awarded her a scholarship to conduct research at A&T. For this project, she’s comparing different ways to convert food waste to compost that could help schools interested in starting their own composting programs. She’s hoping to get this project and her wastewater research published.
Her doggedness has impressed her advisor.
“She is a true example of resilience, perseverance, and never-give-up mentality,” said Aryal, an assistant professor of biological engineering. “She has already come a long way and is continuing to work on her recovery. I am proud of her accomplishments.”
Grogan’s next stop will be Virginia Tech, where she will pursue a Ph.D. in biological systems engineering starting this fall. She said she’s passionate about treating waste and composting and hopes to work in one of these fields. Doctorate work will be hard, she said, but hard in a different way.
At A&T, Sundays were in some ways hardest of all simply because so little was happening and Grogan prefers to stay busy. With no classes to break up her day and no students hanging around the quiet campus, Grogan spent all day in the lab, where she studied and worked on her research.
“I got a lot done,” said Grogan. “Getting my degree in biological engineering from N.C. A&T is one of my biggest goals in life.’’
“Onnr was doing exceptionally well when this unfortunate accident happened,” said Aryal, who kept in touch with Grogan throughout her recovery. “We are proud of how she was able to stay positive throughout the difficult period, and proud of her decision to come back to finish her BS degree in Biological Engineering. We have the utmost confidence in her ability to excel and be the best biological engineer that she can be.”
