Mentorship in Motion

Q&A

Interview by Eleanor Wyllie
Photos by Heather Coit
Video by Virgil Ward

An undergraduate research experience and a friendship forged in the residence halls led a Grainger Engineer on a 4,000-mile bicycle trek to raise funds for combatting cancer. Anish Thakkar (BS ’07 EE) learned about scientific research in Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Michael Oelze’s lab. His Allen Hall roommate, an education and history student and a fellow cycling enthusiast, Jonathan Schlesinger helped Thakkar formally launch the Illini 4000. 

As the current Illini 4000 team, which includes six Grainger Engineering students, embarks on their fundraising journey this summer, we met with Oelze and Thakkar. Oelze talks about meeting the challenges of a complex disease while mentoring the next generation of students, while Thakkar shares how his experiences as an undergraduate gave him the confidence to build global solar energy business Sun King with fellow ECE alumnus Patrick Walsh.

Professor Michael Oelze / Electrical and Computer Engineering

Photo Credit: Heather Coit

You were Anish’s advisor in 2007. What was it like working with him?

He was like all of our ECE students: smart, curious, really gets into things and asks lots of questions about how things work. I remember he was very interested in the problems we were dealing with — trying to improve the diagnosis of breast cancer using ultrasound and developing that as a screening tool.

How has cancer research advanced over the past 16 years at Illinois?

The work that Paul Hergenrother and Timothy Fan have done with new cancer drugs, being able to test those in the clinic and see real-world impact, that's pretty exciting. Zhi-Pei Liang’s brain imaging, being able to look at the features and say if something is cancer or not. A lot of great things are going on.

There’s the work that Rohit Bhargava has done in pulling together the Cancer Center at Illinois, and everything that's being done there supporting cancer research. We’re involving a lot more people in cancer research through this center. That's been a huge success here in Illinois over the past 16 years.

In my research group, we're moving into the clinic now. We're coming up with better ways of detecting the response of breast cancer patients to chemotherapy. We need to know if patients who are undergoing new adjuvant systemic therapies are responding early or not, so we've come up with ultrasound-based techniques that do that. We're working with folks at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto to implement these technologies, working with a company called QT Imaging to improve their device, and working with folks at the Mayo Clinic for other breast cancer-based applications.

16 years ago, we were probably only looking at preclinical models. Now, after all these years, we're actually doing this in the clinic, bringing it closer to a real translation. I see that with a lot of my colleagues who may have started with preclinical models, but now they're doing real empirical research. Things move from the lab to the clinic, and that's really exciting to see here as well.

You're not a cyclist, but do you play any other sports?

I run, I play basketball at the ARC with some staff, faculty and some folks from in town here. It's a lot of fun. I play tennis. I play with my daughter, but I'm also part of a little tennis group in ECE.

Do you have anything else you'd like to add?

I was at UT Austin about a month and a half ago for a conference, and I was running on this riverside trail. As I was running, I saw this guy bicycling, he had Illini 4000 gear. I yelled out “I-L-L,” but he didn't hear me. He rode past very quickly. That guy must have done the Illini 4000 at some point.

Anish Thakkar / ECE Alumnus and Sun King Co-Founder

When you co-founded Illini 4000, you were doing cancer research with Professor Michael Oelze. How did that influence the creation of Illini 4000?

I really enjoyed working in Professor Oelze's lab. It was fascinating to understand how a research lab works and how scientific discovery works – it's a rigorous and sometimes tedious process. The work in Professor Oelze's lab brought my mind to the question: what's the human experience of this? How else can we do good for people that are affected by cancer? That's what led me to discuss the idea of the Illini 4000 with Jonathan Schlesinger.

Was the University of Illinois a supportive place to set up Illini 4000? What were the challenges in establishing it?

I think the university was an incredibly supportive place. The idea for Illini 4000 started with: there's this network of organizations that raise funds for both cancer research and support programs for people affected by cancer. Could we create a vehicle for raising donations for those organizations through cross-country cycling, something that people could get excited about, that could tap into a romantic idea of doing something difficult for big causes? When Jon and I discussed it, it was exciting to us – the question was, could we convince others? That was one of the biggest early challenges.

When something like the Illini 4000 already exists, it's a given that students can raise the money, that they can train for this long, arduous journey and complete it. That's more believable today because so many people have done it, but back then it was hard to get students, organizers and donors to believe in it. But the university as a whole was so supportive, it was amazing to me the resources available for starting a student organization.

It's been 16 years since the first ride in 2007. How do you feel about that success?

I haven't seen the cycling team in many years, being physically far away from the US. But for many years the team would visit my parents’ house. I grew up in New Jersey, and the first year the team started out from our house. For years after that, the team would start in New York, and finish [the first day] at my parents’ home. I'd get updates from my parents, and from organizers in the Illini 4000 throughout the years.

I've been really floored and humbled by how organized the leaders in the Illini 4000 are. In that first year, I don't think we were particularly organized. Sometimes doing something for the first time is difficult, and you have to fill in the holes along the way.

It's been amazing to see how student leaders have built on and improved the way the ride is organized, how students are selected. The fundraising programs, the interaction with the organizations that the Illini 4000 raises money for, it's just been incredible to see how much the organization has advanced.

Could you share any memories or impressions from the first ride in 2007?

The ride itself was just such an incredible experience and it followed a tough spring where we were trying to build a team, work out the logistics of the ride and hit our own fundraising goals. And of course, do that while being full time university students.

The day before the ride was an incredible day of logistics chaos, just to get that kickoff from New York organized. The few of us that were really involved in the logistics, I don't think we slept really at all that first night.

I remember the first day of cycling very well. Out of New York, straight into Pennsylvania, to very hilly roads. Many of us were a bit nervous about how difficult the cycling would be. We trained a lot, so I think we all felt very fit. But that first day of riding, after an all-nighter, it's just an intensely hard thing to do. I remember at one point, climbing what felt like the 50th very tall, very steep hill, thinking, wow, this is day one of 70. But then you wake up, day two, and it gets a little easier. And day three gets a little easier, you catch up on sleep, and it turned into an incredible trip with so many moments of human connection.

We planned to collect the experiences of people who had been affected by cancer along the way. I was surprised by how forthcoming people were, people that I'd never met, people with very different life experiences. Reading the news today, America is many Americas with a lot of very differing, and often polarized viewpoints, but on that bicycle ride, many, many years ago, it was just moments of surprise and human connection and very open sharing. That was pretty touching.

You co-founded Sun King, which provides solar energy solutions for under-electrified consumers. How did your time at the University of Illinois help prepare you for that? Did that tie into anything you did at ECE?

It really did. Maybe the biggest way was a belief in the idea that we can have ideas. The world needs so many solutions to big problems. In the case of Sun King, we had to build a new technology, and that's hard. But sometimes the hardest thing about doing something new is just the fact that it's new, that you have to envision a future. You have to make other people believe in it. You have to believe in it. I think the Illini 4000 for me was the first real example of seeing that in practice up close. We started out with an outlandish idea and managed to convince people that we could do it. Then we did it. And then the organization could progress and do it again, do it better and at larger scale every year. Doing that with the Illini 4000 created a belief in my own mind about what people can do when they're aligned around a great vision for bringing positive change. Without the Illini 4000, I wouldn’t have had the confidence or belief that Sun King at its scale was so achievable.

I should add that I joined Patrick Walsh's effort with Sun King. Patrick came up with the idea. It was at the same time that the Illini 4000 was coming into formation that I met Patrick, and really got excited about his idea. And we agreed, let's build this organization together.

Do you have any advice for current students?

I really enjoyed my coursework as an engineering student, I loved the academic challenge and there was something new to learn every day. As I was coming up to graduation, like many students, I was uncertain about what I wanted to do. The advice I have is start with something that really excites you, even if it's outlandish.

If you're not excited about the status quo path that's in front of you, use everything you've learned, the hard skills, the soft skills, the belief in yourself, use them to do something that really excites you. If it's a path that many people haven't gone down before, see that as the opportunity. Maybe it's a path that needs to be traveled. Don't over focus on the risk of failure, because you've got a lot of time to fail, learn and move on.

Do you have anything else you would like to add?

Jon and I met at Allen Hall, and my experience at Allen Hall was very formative too. When I moved into Allen Hall, as a sophomore, it was an incredible experience, there was such a diversity of views and an openness to moving away from convention. It was a wonderful place to learn who I was, and to understand the world in a much broader way than when you learn through textbooks. When I think about the Illini 4000, I think about Allen Hall, both as two really formative parts of my university experience. I'm really grateful for them.