As Nuri Jeong lay on the pavement of Northside Drive, pinned down by the weight of a Chevy Suburban, a thought shouted from her subconscious, “I’ve got to save my brain!”

It was April 2022, one year before her PhD defense. She’d been crossing the street near her apartment when the young driver turned right while looking left.

“He never saw me,” says Jeong, at the time a member of Annabelle Singer’s lab in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “The next thing I know, I’m on the ground looking up at the sky. I was fully conscious the whole time.”

Worried about brain damage, she lifted her arm up just to see if she could do it. Her arm was fine. So was her brain. But there was 6,000 pounds of SUV on her leg. She had tire marks on her body. The driver’s little brother leapt out from the passenger side to check on Jeong and she remembered that he was crying.

“I realized this was just as traumatic for them as it was for me,” says Jeong, who remained calm throughout the ordeal partly because the boy’s tears had triggered something deep within her. Jeong conjured empathetic superpowers she’d acquired in a compassion-based meditation program at Emory. That kept her tranquil through the pain.

The accident left her with broken bones in her shattered leg, requiring surgery and months of physical therapy. Today she can climb flights of stairs with no problem. Nonetheless, the accident left its mark, inspiring a career path that she never really expected. 

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