By Rick Vacek | October 6, 2025
A visit to Scotland tends to inspire a lot of superlatives, but three National Merit Scholars from the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College went to extremes while talking about their summer stay at the University of Glasgow.
“It was such a vibrant and full experience … everything,” said Jyotsna Tera, a senior biology and healthcare management major at The University of Texas at Dallas. “The research was fantastic. The people I met were fantastic. The places I saw, especially in Scotland, were jaw-breaking – literally insane.”
Junior physics and philosophy major Nihal Anand found his happy places in the green spaces of Glasgow and two other Scottish cities, Aberdeen and Edinburgh.
But his favorite spot was Kelvingrove Park, next to the University of Glasgow. The park was named after British scientist William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin, who invented the Kelvin absolute temperature scale.
“It has these amazing walking trails and hills,” he said. “You get a nice hike in and have stunning views of the city and the university. I was there pretty much every day. I would get up and just go walk.”
Hannah Choi, a senior neuroscience major who, like Tera, is on a pre-med track, traveled even deeper into nature when she joined a dozen other students at a bothy, one of the small, open-to-anyone cabins in remote areas of Scotland, Wales and Northern England.
They swam in the river, caught moths, tracked footprints, built bonfires, roasted marshmallows and learned the Scots’ ceilidh (pronounced kay-lee) dancing, with – news flash – spotty access to wifi. Who needs to use a cellphone when you can do all that?
“The best week of my life,” she said.
Choi also was happy to be outdoors for most of her research, which involved setting up nets to catch birds and take their measurements. Her group mostly caught passerines, which make up more than half of the world’s bird species, to see if their breeding season had been successful.
Choi is thankful she spotted the Scotland experience among the international research options shared by Dr. Donal Skinner, Dean of the Honors College:
“Dean Skinner gives us all these opportunities, and I said, ‘Wow, this is the one project I’m interested in.’ It gave me more appreciation for the birds. I get why he really emphasizes international education.”
Anand’s quantum machine learning research was a first-time venture for the Honors College. Skinner had sought to create a partnership with Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering and found an eager participant in Dr. Kaveh Delfanazari, a Senior Lecturer in the school.
Quantum computing, which uses quantum physics principles in its attempt to solve problems that befuddle the most powerful classical computers, fascinates Anand, who would like to be a professor someday.
“The idea has just gripped me,” he said.
This is how he explained it when he spoke to the research symposium in Glasgow:
“Imagine I have two big buckets and I ask you to toss a ball in one of them. You can probably do that with close to 100% accuracy. Now imagine if I divided those buckets into very small compartments and told you to toss the ball into a particular compartment. Those little errors, those little mistakes, those little deviations become very big.
“I learned that quantum computers are much better at binary classifications – those two big buckets – but are very bad at those fine-grained issues.”
Tera’s research task was examining the thyroid glands of sheep exposed to chemicals that humans frequently encounter. She was grateful for the freedom granted by her mentor, Dr. Michelle Bellingham, Senior Lecturer in Glasgow’s School of Biodiversity, One Health and Veterinary Medicine.
“It was my first time doing a research project where I was in control,” Tera said. “She would guide me but also gave me the leeway to take my own steps.”
One of those steps, near the end of her stay, was using her coding experience to create a program that counted the cells in the thyroid slides. It worked so well, Bellingham told her it would be used in other projects, too.
And when Tera asked if she could see a sheep dissection, Bellingham arranged it … inspiring more praise for the experience.
“Whatever we wanted to do,” Tera said, “they were really supportive of us.”
The trio tested the limits of Scotland’s charm and never came away disappointed.
Tera, who also enjoyed the ceilidh dancing, had to take three forms of transportation to reach the town of Callander. The Portland, Oregon, native and her companions then hiked to the top of Ben A’an mountain, from where they could see Loch Katrine and Loch Achray.
“I really like Scotland because it’s similar to Oregon,” she said. “That was the good thing about Glasgow because it was never really hot. It was a beautiful temperature the entire time I was there. It was rainy a little bit, but I’m used to that.”
Anand was astounded to find that all the buildings in Aberdeen are the same shade of gray because they’re built with materials from a nearby granite mine.
“I loved Aberdeen. It’s a very pretty place,” he said.
But the final superlative is from Choi, whose thought process in planning her last summer before she graduates aptly sums up why Glasgow earned such high marks from the nine-person UT Dallas cohort:
“I knew I wanted to do research abroad. I was done with all my medical school stuff, and I’ve always been interested in environmental science, and I know Scotland’s beautiful.
“It was kind of perfect.”
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