The Artist and the Engineer: Shae Threlfall Paints Her Path to a Cambridge Ph.D.

Each morning, nothing. 

One December morning at home in Springdale, her ritual came up empty again. But something told her to take one more glance before class. There it was. 

She had been accepted to pursue a doctorate in mechanical engineering at the University of Cambridge, one of the world's oldest universities. Threlfall was thrilled, but the cost was too much. 

She was determined. Over winter break, she researched and found the Ashby Studentship and applied the day before the deadline. The award, given to one or two students a year, covers the full cost of tuition and housing and provides a living stipend. 

In February, she received the award. 

"This is too good to be true," she said. "They have Hogwarts-style dinners twice a semester. We have to wear robes. It doesn't sound real." 

Threlfall graduated in May from the U of A with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, a minor in mathematics and a perfect 4.0 grade point average. 

An honors student, she was named the Department of Mechanical Engineering's Outstanding Senior and was a finalist for the College of Engineering's top graduating honor. She spent four years as an undergraduate researcher in professor Min Zou's Nanomechanics and Tribology Laboratory. 

Her Cambridge application looked like what you would expect from a candidate with that record, except for one thing. She included her portfolio of paintings. 

She was advised against it, but included it anyway. 

"If they don't see the importance of being an artist engineer, if they think that I am less of an engineer because I'm an artist, then I don't want to go there," Threlfall said. 

Her conviction found an ally in the Cambridge professor she hoped to study under. When she asked him what she should include in her application, his answer was immediate: her art. 

Threlfall has been a painter longer than she has been an engineer, and she wanted Cambridge to accept all of her. 

"I don't want to be limited to be just an engineer," she said. 

"Being an artist heavily informs how I pursue school, how I pursue research," Threlfall said. "It is one of my favorite aspects of being an engineer." 

The Problem Child 

The two identities have never been separate for her. Threlfall grew up the artist in a family of computer scientists. "I was the problem child," she said. 

Her engineering identity began at the very university she just left. The summer before eighth grade, she attended a summer engineering camp on the Fayetteville campus. Her twin brother wanted to attend, and she got roped into it. 

"Mom made me do it," she said, insisting she would never be an engineer. The insistence did not survive high school. She discovered a love of making things, designing things. 

Her artist identity never needed a beginning. By her junior year at Haas Hall, she had enrolled in Advanced Placement studio art with teacher Basil Seymour-Davies, who earned his Master of Arts in art education from the U of A's School of Art in 2024. Her year-long AP investigation had a title that reads now like a thesis statement for her whole career: exploring the aesthetic of the machine. 

"Great learners have an easier path to become great artists," Seymour-Davies said. "The skill set required to be a great learner applies to the creative realm very well." 

The machines she painted were bright, precise and unmistakably hers, and they caught the right pair of eyes. 

At 16, while working a high school job at RCAL Products Inc., an electronics manufacturing company in Prairie Grove, she showed a painting to her boss. 

He commissioned eight canvases of the company's equipment, not as decoration but as explanation. When investors and visitors tour the company, they learn how the machines work from Threlfall's paintings. The canvases still hang there today, alongside a logo mural she painted afterward. 

She was doing engineering communication through art before she had ever heard the term. 

When she arrived at the U of A, she was welcomed by mechanical engineering professor Darin Nutter. She said he treated her combination of art and engineering as an asset rather than a curious quirk. 

"It was the first time that someone had looked at my stuff and been like, yes, we want you, and we don't want just your [analytical] skill set," she said. "He also wanted the part of me that was good at being an artist too." 

"I feel seen." 

The Lowest Low Before the Highest High 

In Zou's lab, which she joined as a freshman, the artist's eye went to work. Her longest battle was a conveyor testing system she inherited, a project she calls her lowest low before her highest high. 

It involved three years of troubleshooting, rebuilding and refusing to quit, work that became her honors thesis on low-friction coatings for energy efficiency. 

Along the way she became the lab's go-to maker of figures, the visual explanations of research that scientific publishing runs on, a craft she learned from her graduate student mentor Julia Hoskins and honed on Microsoft PowerPoint. 

Zou began lending her out to make figures for projects she had never touched. 

"Your work is only as effective as your ability to present it," Threlfall said. 

"She's intelligent and creative," Hoskins said. "She uses those strengths to solve complex engineering problems in ways that are thoughtful and original. She brings imagination, attention to detail and genuine curiosity to her work, and I couldn't be more proud of the researcher and engineer she's become." 

Threlfall's research portfolio grew to include a National Science Foundation-funded research experience and a NASA-funded project on lunar dust mitigation that produced a published journal article. 

The Last Name on the List 

When it came time to choose a doctoral program, she had funded offers closer to home. She chose differently, guided by a principle she repeats like a rule: prioritize the research, not the institution. 

She found Matteo Seita, who will supervise her doctoral work at Cambridge, by cold emailing her way down a list of faculty whose work interested her. His name fell near the end of the alphabet, on the last page, and she almost gave up before she reached it. He replied within 30 minutes. 

In their interview, he asked what research she wanted to pursue. She pitched him an idea. He told her he had submitted a proposal for that very research shortly before their meeting. 

"I was like, we're in," she said. "We're so in." 

At Cambridge she will study microstructure control in metal 3D printing, work she describes as tuning the process rather than pioneering it. 

The prospect is not without nerves. She confessed to Seita that Cambridge intimidated her, a place where everyone seems to already know everything. He told her she would be okay. Her answer has become something of a personal creed. 

"Everything that I know now was once something I didn't know," she said. 

She is quick to share the credit: "My career is only as big as the mentors who helped me build it." 

"Mentoring Shae has been a privilege," Zou said. "She is one of the most persistent and self-motivated students I've mentored. Once she sets her mind on a goal, she pursues it with determination, whether in research or in pursuing new opportunities to grow and challenge herself. Earning a fully funded Ph.D. opportunity at Cambridge is a tremendous achievement and a well-deserved recognition of her dedication and perseverance. I look forward to seeing the impact she will make in the years ahead." 

Not Just an Engineer 

Seymour-Davies said he often watches students like Threlfall collide with an outdated assumption that art and math don't mix. 

"Sometimes in contemporary times, we see them as exclusive realms," he said of art and the STEM fields. "You're a math person, you must not do a lot of art." 

His former student is a standing refutation, one who spent her undergraduate years giving more than 100 campus tours as an engineering ambassador, logging more than 500 volunteer hours in robotics outreach and painting community murals that put engineering in front of young students. 

Threlfall wants to be a professor one day, running a lab of her own. Asked what advice she would give other Arkansas students looking at her story, she does not hesitate. 

"You're only limited by your mindset. If you'd asked me three months ago whether I'd be published under a NASA project, I would have laughed. Believe in yourself and take advantage of the resources around you.  

Most of the time, the people around you believe in you, too." 

About the College of Engineering:  The University of Arkansas College of Engineering is the state's largest engineering school, offering graduate and undergraduate degrees, online studies and interdisciplinary programs. It enrolls more than 4,700 students and employs more than 150 faculty and researchers along with nearly 200 staff members. Its research enterprise generated $47 million in new research awards in Fiscal Year 2025. The college's strategic plan, Vision 2035, seeks to build the premier STEM workforce in accordance with three key objectives: Initiating lifelong student success, generating transformational and relevant knowledge, and becoming the destination of choice among educators, students, staff, industry, alumni and the community. As part of this, the college is increasing graduates and research productivity to expand its footprint as an entrepreneurial engineering platform serving Arkansas and the world. The college embraces its pivotal role in driving economic growth, fueling innovation and educating the next generation of engineers, computer scientists and data scientists to address current and future societal challenges.