1 Professor, 17 Years, 3,300 Students Helped: ‘We Give These Kids Hope’

BILLY HUDSON WAS RAISED IN POVERTY AND TORTURED BY HIS PARENTS—THEN RESCUED BY HIS TEACHERS. NOW HE HELPS STRUGGLING YOUNG PEOPLE GET A CHANCE TO ACHIEVE THEIR DREAMS

- EILEEN FINAN

It’s May 1958, and 16-year-old Billy Hudson is bloody and battered, lying in the dirt near his rural Arkansas home. He’s clutching a shotgun, trying to decide whether to kill himself or the father who abused him.

Tears still form in Hudson’s eyes when he reflects on that moment more than six decades later—and on how he escaped that dark place with the help of a high school teacher who recognized his potential. “It was a turning point,” says Hudson, now 83, a biochemistry professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and an expert in kidney disease research. “I went from no hope to sunshine overnight.”

For the past 17 years Hudson has been offering that same sense of possibility to other students facing hardship—abuse, poverty or just a lack of access to advanced education—through a nonprofit he cofounded called Aspirnaut. The goal of the organization is to encourage kids to “aspire, seek and achieve” through STEM education. Since 2007 Aspirnaut has brought 362 mostly rural students in need from 34 states to do summer research at Vanderbilt and reached another 3,000-plus students in Arkansas through science and distance-learning programs. “We show people a pathway lined with opportunities,” Hudson says, “so they can dream.”