Spending Her Day Surrounded By Spiders

Kiran Khan, a senior at Adelphi University, has a lot on her plate.

She just completed a 36-credit course load this semester and is graduating in December. After her graduation, she is going to Germany with her professor and mentor, Matthias Foellmer, to get a once-in-a-lifetime chance to further her research at the only lab in the world that has the equipment she needs. Once that’s done, she’ll come home and apply to medical school.

In her spare time — what little of that she has — she runs her own tutoring business. Not the kind where she goes to the homes of one or two children, but the kind with two different brick-and-mortar locations in Brooklyn that has more than 20 clients and her own staff.

At 23 years old, she has already completed her Ph.D in physical medicine and rehabilitation, and has earned an MBA, which helped her expand her business. And on top of all that, she has maintained a 4.0 GPA.

With the semester over, Khan isn’t resting for the summer, though. She is one of eight Adelphi students to be selected for the Horace G. McDonell Science Research Fellowship program. She will spend her 10-week summer doing something that most people would never want to do: working with spiders.

Khan didn’t plan on working with spiders — or any animals, for that matter. She wants to go into medicine to help people, and is actually afraid of most animals. But when the opportunity to work with Foellmer presented itself, Khan jumped at the chance, spiders and all.

"I am interested in a career in neuroradiology and neurodiagnostics and going to med school in January, so imaging and tests and studying their anatomy, their pedipalps and their physiology is going to help me because that is exactly what I want to do,” she said. “Radiology, physician work, diagnosing patients by looking at their images, looking at their scans, coming up with new technology to find the bits and pieces of everything."

Khan keeps dozens of quarter-sized Argiope aurantia spiders (commonly called yellow garden spiders) in a special climate-controlled lab on the Adelphi campus. Every day, she feeds them and gives them water. Her research involves the mating habits of the spiders, and if there are changes that occur if they mate before or after the female’s exoskeleton hardens.

“This just called to me,” she said.

When she started, she was scared of the spiders. But she helped many of them hatch, and has grown to have a motherly affection for them. Some of them even have names, like Margaret or Big Momma.

She breeds the spiders and tries to freeze them as they are in the act of copulating. It’s her hope to catch that brief moment so she can bring her samples to Germany to be examined under a micro CT scanner — something that would give her unprecedented detail.

Khan is freezing and studying spiders so she can learn more about scanning and anatomy, and apply that knowledge to her future career in medicine. She has had a single-minded focus on that goal for years, ever since she awoke from a coma following a deadly car crash.

She was one of only two survivors of a five-car crash on I-95 in New Jersey in 2013. Twenty others died. Khan was in a coma for seven months and, due to extenuating circumstances, no one notified her parents. They thought she had ran away, or worse.

When she eventually woke up and was reunited with her family, she listened closely as the doctors showed her the medical scans of her brain and knew from then on that she wanted to become a doctor to help others.

"I always knew I wanted to help people,” she said. “But ever since the accident, I have been so interested in the brain, scans and imaging that it's all I think about. I saw many of them while I was injured. There is nothing I can think of except doing neurology and diagnostics."

If all goes well, Khan will soon have a few hundred spiders to study, which will give her plenty of samples to bring to Germany. It was an unexpected road that took her to working with spiders, but Khan doesn’t regret any of it.

“I took evolutionary psychology with Professor Lawrence Josephs in the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies,” she said. “I was very intrigued and interested. So, I was looking for a professor doing evolutionary biology. I read Professor Foellmer's papers. Then, when I was offered this opportunity in the lab and the fellowship and then traveling to the University of Greifswald in Germany to do MicroCT imaging and looking at the argiope in copulation … this is my calling … and here I am working with spiders."

Photos: Alex Costello/Patch