1 Professor, 17 Years, 3,300 Students Helped: ‘We Give These Kids Hope’
People US|January 27, 2025
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
1 Professor, 17 Years, 3,300 Students Helped: ‘We Give These Kids Hope’

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.”

Growing up on a farm without running water or electricity in tiny Grapevine, Ark., Hudson had little exposure to the outside world, let alone lofty aspirations. As quiet as it was in the central Arkansas woods surrounding his family’s home, inside was chaos. “I was tortured,” he says. Hudson’s father, Cecil, a logger, had a ferocious temper that scared even his own parents, who lived nearby. He unleashed his fury regularly on Hudson’s mother, Gladys. When Hudson was 7, his father attacked her with a hammer. “I tried to push him off, and he threw me across the room,” Hudson recalls. “I saw a lot of that.”

This story is from the January 27, 2025 edition of People US.

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This story is from the January 27, 2025 edition of People US.

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