Professors at UTC Were Her Life’s Mentors, Stephanie Fraley Says by Chuck Wasserstrom
Stephanie Fraley is a cancer researcher. Imagine the countless people she will help in her career.
Photo by Katherine Connor
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Now imagine if she never had the opportunity to launch that career because no one was there to help her when she needed it most. “I almost had to drop out of college for financial and family reasons,” said Fraley, a 2006 graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “There were a lot of family struggles going on. I was working nights and I had a job off-campus, but it was to the point where to be able to sustain, I was going to have to take on more fulltime work and not be able to take full-time classes. The late Gavin Townsend, a professor in the UTC Honors College who passed away in 2018, changed her life’s trajectory. “Dr. Townsend helped save me from that,” she continued. “Through his efforts, he found scholarship money that was left over or hiding out somewhere and was able to divert it to me. I was able to stay in school and live on campus. So yes, he really saved my career. After receiving a chemical engineering degree, she earned a Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Johns Hopkins University, but she’s never forgotten Townsend’s commitment to her success. Nor has she forgotten the contributions of the late Frank Jones, a UTC chemical engineering professor, who stoked her research interest. He passed away in 2017. “I had always wanted to go into scientific research, and he was key to my going in that direction,” Fraley said. “Dr. Jones was teaching one of my senior year classes and realized what I was interested in, and he was doing some computational research. He brought me on and allowed me to focus all my efforts on research, which is the only way I could have ever gotten into the graduate school that I got into. He was just instrumental in helping me grow.
