Yusong (Sebastian) Deng ’22 is clear about the importance of F&M in his life. And he remembers specific events that still resonate with him four years after his graduation.

Most evenings during his junior year at Franklin & Marshall, Deng followed the same routine. After his weekly capstone meeting with the first-year students he lived with as a house adviser, he would walk them to Blueline Cafe (now the Diplomatic Cafe), buy everyone something with whatever was left on his meal plan that week, and then carry his notebook to Stager Hall. 

He'd call his girlfriend — now his wife, Yiting Yao, a doctoral student in applied mathematics at Yale — and chat while he wrote out a problem across the blackboard: the knowns, the theorems, the edges of a problem in equidissection that no one had yet solved. Then he would calculate. Line by line, filling the board. Erase. Start again. Move to the next, fill that board, too. Erase. He did this for months, in most classrooms in Stager, until one night he was able to walk the proof all the way through.

That paper was published after he left F&M. He would discover that most students at Columbia and Yale had never done full-stack (meaning the researcher manages every stage of a project, from initial planning and data collection to analysis and final reporting) independent research like he had done as an undergraduate.

"I found that students who had gone to MIT or Cornell had not experienced research the way I had at F&M," Deng says. "I already knew what it felt like — the mechanics, the rhythm, the months of nothing followed by the moment it works."

Deng came to the United States from China at 18. He completed F&M's dual degree program — three years at Franklin & Marshall, two at Columbia University — earning a bachelor of arts with honors in mathematics from F&M, and a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from Columbia. He is now a doctoral student in materials science at Yale, where he says his research on light-controlled atomic engineering in two-dimensional materials is on the cusp of opening a new paradigm in the field. He is the co-founder of AtomLux, a spin-out developing room-temperature single-photon emitters — the foundational light source that will underpin quantum communication and cryptography.

Deng is also the youngest member of Franklin & Marshall's Board of Trustees. "It was a surprise and an honor to be asked to serve the college as a Trustee," he says.

The path from a small liberal arts college to atomic engineering might seem unusual. Deng sees it differently. The liberal arts, he says, did something for him that engineering school alone would never have taught him.

"I arrived at F&M at 18, and everything since — Columbia, Yale, all of it — has been built on what began at F&M. Not the coursework or the credentials, but something deeper: how I think, what I value, what I believe is possible."

-Yusong (Sebastian) Deng '22

"I had a class where I had to watch Bicycle Thieves, Taxi Driver, Crouching Tiger, and Vertigo, and write about them," he recalls. "I thought, ‘what a waste of time, I could be in the lab.’"

He wrote his responses the way he wrote his lab notes — describing what the director had done, cataloguing technique. His professor handed one back with a comment he has never forgotten: “I'm asking what you saw, not what the director filmed.”

"Everyone can describe what happened,” Deng says. “The question is, what do you see in it?"

As a trustee, Deng tries to help whenever he is asked — especially when it comes to events for international students. The same kind of events that, years earlier, made his own family comfortable enough to send their son to a college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, they had never seen. He knows what it is to arrive somewhere far from home and find that it fits.

"I arrived at F&M at 18, and everything since — Columbia, Yale, all of it — has been built on what began at F&M," Deng wrote in a recent message for an event F&M hosted in Beijing for admitted students. "Not the coursework or the credentials, but something deeper: how I think, what I value, what I believe is possible."

Deng says he supports F&M with his time and financial resources because the experience was so pivotal for him —and because he loves the institution.

And because he’ll always remember that blackboard in Stager, and the specific weight of a problem that took months to crack, in a building where no one rushed him.

"The world my fellow students will enter does not exist yet," Deng says. "My job as a Trustee is to make sure F&M keeps building the kind of resilience that helps people face whatever comes — the way it built mine."