Vanderbilt door opens for student

Sheridan native Cody Stothers said he knows the truth has been the hardest on his grandmother Frances Taylor.

“She was pretty honest. She never tried to hide the situation from me. It was always an age-appropriate truth, but it was the truth no matter what,” Stothers said.

Taylor’s daughter, Azure Smith, gave birth to Stothers on Dec. 23, 1991, after she was transported to a Jefferson County hospital from the Arkansas prison where she was incarcerated.

Stothers is unclear of the exact details of his birth, but he has been told that he was taken home by his grandmother, who is now 70, in a Christmas stocking after prison social workers told her he otherwise would be placed in state foster care.

Two weeks ago, exactly 22 years later - to the day - Stothers learned that he had been accepted on a full scholarship into the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine’s dual-degree program. He will simultaneously earn his M.D. and Ph.D. to become a physician and research scientist. Stothers is one of only seven admitted to the program in Nashville, Tenn.

Stothers began the longand highly competitive application process last summer.

“They had no idea it was my birthday when they called at 2 p.m. that day. I was at home with my grandma. We were pretty thrilled. My grandmother had been waiting a long time to hear the news,” Stothers said.

Haunted by a lifetime of drug use, Smith has been in and out of prison and jail for most of Stothers’ life.

He is matter-of-fact about the meager relationship he has had with his mother.

He has no anger toward her, Stothers said, and he has not felt deprived. His grandfather Paul Taylor passed away when Stothers was just 5 years old, leaving his grandmother to raise him on a $9,500 annual disability stipend.

His grandmother was tenacious in instilling in Stothers that his humble circumstances were not his identity.

“I didn’t openly come out and say, ‘Hi, my mother is in prison.’ The reason I appreciate that she was open with me is because it helped me come to terms with who I am. It was never something I felt like I had to hide. It was just another fact of life,” Stothers said.

Frances Taylor kept Stothers stocked in crayons, pencils and paper, and made hand-in-hand walks each week to the public library, where an abundance of free reading material awaited throughout his childhood.

Taylor never graduated from high school, but Stothers said she sat beside him every night helping him with his homework in his elementary years.

As the school subjects increased past her understanding, Stothers said his grandmother stayed vigiliant, ensuring that his homework was completed and keeping in contact with his teachers.

“I always identified as the kid who liked school. She was just really encouraging and said it doesn’t really matter where you started. You have these resources, and you need to work with it and do what you can. She never lied about what we had, but she was adamant that what we had would be enough if we worked hard enough,” Stothers said.

And an education, his grandmother told him, was the only way to a better life.

Of 4,200 students in the Sheridan School District, nearly 52 percent qualify for free or reduced meals.

Even with the limited resources of the rural school district, Stothers immersed himself in everything the district had to offer and then asked for more.

He was placed in the Gifted & Talented Program and took every Advanced Placement course available.

“Cody has enormous initiative. He is unique in that his high school didn’t offer a lot of Advanced Placement courses. He took all that he could, then got the textbooks himself, studied and sat for the AP exams,” said Dr. Julie Hudson, assistant vice chancellor for Health Affairs at Vanderbilt.

Hudson is the director and co-founder of the Aspirnaut program, which works to provide learning opportunities in the areas of science, technology and math to rural school districts.

The initiative - which now stretches from Arkansas to Maine and serves more than 2,000 students - began in 2006 as the inspiration of Hudson’s husband, Billy Hudson.

Billy Hudson - a Grapevine native, the Elliot V. Newman professor of medicine, biochemistry and pathology, and the director of the Center for Matrix Biology at Vanderbilt University - is a survivor of child abuse and poverty.

The husband and wife - along with the support of the Grapevine community, the Sheridan School District and the Center for Science Outreach at Vanderbilt University Medical Center - began the program by equipping a busof Grapevine students with notebook computers and other portable learning devices to offer science and math programs during the students’ long commutes to and from Sheridan schools each day.

The Aspirnaut program grew to include a 10-week summer internship at Vanderbilt, where students worked in laboratories, attended classes and conducted research.

Stothers attended the Aspirnaut camp the summer after his junior year at Sheridan High School. He returned from his 10 weeks on the Vanderbilt University campus with his life’s goal and eyes that were opened to opportunities he said he never would have known.

“Nobody ever told me you could get waivers for the ACT. There are resources for those that are disadvantaged, but you have to seek them out. You’re not always told about them. That’s where the Aspirnauts program comes through. They bring those resources and opportunities out and show us more than we could ever find ourselves,” Stothers said.

Stothers spent his senior year at Sheridan High School riding the school bus with Grapevine students, tutoring them and answering their technology questions.

Once a week, he and the students would meet at a satellite classroom in Grapevine’s Sardis Missionary Baptist Church for a lesson directly from Vanderbilt University.

Stothers has been fully enveloped in the program for the past five years. He stays in the dorms with the students during the summer internships, acts as a mentor and teaches science lessons via the satellite classrooms to middle-school students in the program.

Julie Hudson said the program seeks to open students from disadvantaged areas to future opportunities.

“The biggest hurdle of a rural education is exposure. Once we bring them here, and they have seen a variety of options, it opens up a whole other piece of the world,” she said.

Jeremiah Ellis of Omaha, who is one of 16 adopted children of Joe and Kitty Ellis, said the Aspirnaut program paved his way to a fully paid college education and a subsequent career as an industrial engineer at a tool manufacturer in Fort Smith.

Jeremiah Ellis, 24, graduated from Omaha High School in Boone County with a 4.02 grade-point average. Last year, he became the first Aspirnaut alumnus to graduate from college when he earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial technology from Berea College in Kentucky.

Four of his siblings are also Aspirnaut participants.

“The Aspirnaut program was quite an eye-opener. It was amazing. I started out just a small-town country boy learning a little bit here and there. I was way over my head,” he said.

By the end of his first summer in the Aspirnaut residency, Ellis said, he could hold his own in a world he previously knew nothing about.

“Some of the concepts of sciences went way beyond. The techniques and lab experiences, there was no way to get that, not even in college,” he added.

Stothers has a semester of college left at Vanderbilt before he begins the dual-degree program in July. From there, he will take two years of medical school, transition to the Ph.D. program for four years, then complete his final year of medical school.

The two degrees will enable him to combine the two loves he was first introduced to by the Aspirnaut program: laboratory research and helping others.

“I don’t know what kind of doctor I want to be, but I want to still see patients and make a difference to the individuals. But as a researcher, when you make a big discovery, there is no telling how many people you will help,” he said.