A profile of the founder of my former department written by a member of my graduate cohort. I TA'd for Dr. Bryant for a year when he was sent to the hospital and he could no longer teach. He's one of the most awe inspiring humans I've ever met.

https://liberalarts.tamu.edu/blog/2020/01/22/what-we-leave-behind/
We had a lot of crazy moments. The craziest had to have been during my first semester with him when I was giving our students a midterm. They hadn't met him in person. I had spoken to him earlier and he had told me he was getting out of the hospital.

"Get some rest," I told him.
"I will."

I'm sitting there about to give the exam around 7:00PM that evening when a student asks me, "is that the professor?"
"No, I'm just the TA."
"No, not you, him!"
Dr. Bryant had gotten out of the hospital that day and came straight to the exam wearing a face mask. He announced to the students, while completely out of breath, that he was extremely sorry that they hadn't met him yet and that he was, indeed their professor.
He told them he had been diagnosed with cancer and that he had nonetheless shown up for the exam, so they all had no excuses to fail😂. Needless to say, he's also one of the funniest people I've ever met.
While in the hospital, Dr. Bryant refused to not work. One of his students brought him a microscope with all the slides he needed to work with while he was isolated for several months. Dude blows my mind.
When controversy broke out in the department last year, one thing was made clear to me by friends who work in Dr. Bryant's lab: it's a safe space by every good stretch of the word. It's one of the few places on campus where they can escape from all the disorder around them.
...mostly, what he had really talked about was passion. That passion that made him recently promise his last graduate student, “I’ll do my very best to survive until you graduate.”

^^Really explains Dr. Bryant.
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