This news item from Cornell Research is about: Jonathan W. Villanueva’s path toward his calling has been untraditional. A second-year PhD student in biomedical sciences, he studied developmental biology and worked in an evolutionary and ecology lab as an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill. When it came time to apply for graduate school, he originally applied to evolutionary ecology programs. Upon rejection, Villanueva took two years off. He spent the first year working in industry for a company that develops tools to diagnose people with bacterial infections. He spent the second year at UNC Chapel Hill, working on a cancer biology project with Praveen Sethupathy, who is now one of his advisers at Cornell University.