A GTRI engineer's plan to earn a master's degree in the Nunn School, and everything else, got put on hold when his infant daughter was diagnosed with brain cancer
Darrel Zeh and his wife were sick and tired of Ohio winter. Tired of the cold. Tired of the snow. Tired of it all.
So when opportunity beckoned in milder Atlanta, they jumped at the chance, leaving behind Zeh’s 10-year civilian career with the U.S. Air Force, a raft of good memories, and a perfectly good snow blower they’d no longer need.
Settling into his new job as a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) working on drone technologies, Zeh also started studying for a master’s degree in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. He calculated it would help him better understand the messy and complicated issues that surround the application of drone technology on the world stage.
Even the pandemic era seemed to allow for a bright spot in their lives: a third child to round out their family. The little girl, born in November 2020, was named Lorelai.
Then, in an instant, it all seemed to start melting away, like a handful of Ohio snow on a suddenly too-warm day.
Lorelai, it seemed, was sick.
A Legacy of Engineering
Zeh always wanted to be an engineer.
“Both of my grandfathers and my father were engineers. I never gave much thought to anything else,” he said.
While studying for an aerospace engineering degree at the University of Florida, Zeh spent summers with his grandparents in the Dayton, Ohio, area while working with the U.S. Air Force at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. After he graduated in 2008, the Air Force brought him on full-time, working on air defense acquisition for countering drones.
By 2018, it seemed time for a change of scenery. Zeh landed a job at GTRI’s Advanced Concepts Lab, where he also works on issues related to drones. One of his responsibilities is to help develop use cases for some of the lab’s programs.
“It’s about determining the likely limitations, operational restrictions, and the implications of the technologies that we are developing, and thinking about some of the things we need to be considering as we’re designing things,” Zeh said.
“I thought a master’s in international security would provide some insights into some of the issues we need to be tackling and how we can use technology to solve security issues, as well as the limitations and ethical considerations we need to be thinking about.”
He applied to the School in the spring of 2019 and began classes that fall. He took core classes in international security, empirical methods, and international relations theory and seemed well on his way to completing his degree by the end of 2021.
When Zeh’s wife Kathryn became pregnant with the couple’s third child — another sibling for big brother Harrison and big sister Rhiannon — everyone was, naturally, excited.
An uneventful pregnancy flowed into a routine birth in November 2020, which transitioned into the exhausting chain of events familiar to all parents: a seemingly endless cycle of feedings and diaper changes leading to a sort of giddy fatigue.
Then came March.
A Devastating Diagnosis
Lorelai seemed sluggish. Does her head seem a little too big?, Zeh remembers his wife asking before she got out a tape measure to check. An urgent care visit followed. Then a trip to the hospital. Then a CT scan. Then an awful realization.
The images showed a giant tumor taking up nearly 50% of Lorelai’s braincase and blocking spinal fluid from leaving her skull. Doctors at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s Scottish Rite hospital inserted a drain to deal with the fluid and scheduled surgery to remove the tumor. The prospects seemed grim.
“They said she would probably be completely paralyzed on her right side, if not more,” Zeh said.
Lorelai’s gentle, soft-spoken neurosurgeon gave her the best outcome she could have hoped for, but she would also need chemotherapy, probably for a couple of years.
At the time, Zeh was halfway through his class on Russian statecraft with Jenna Jordan and Adam Stulberg.
“They were so supportive,” Zeh said. “They wanted to work out a way I could finish a paper so I wouldn’t have to withdraw, but I was in such a state, I couldn’t sit down at a computer to write anything that I would want someone else to read.”
So he pulled out of the class, putting his educational goals and much of his work on hold to tend to his daughter and family.
The following weeks passed in a blur of overnight hospital stays, chemotherapy visits, stress, and tears. Darrel and Kathryn traded off responsibilities for staying home with Harrison and Rhiannon. A 30-day hospital stay became monthly week-long stays for chemotherapy. Weekly trips to the hospital for blood scans, transfusions, and ER visits added to the routine. And as 2021 faded into 2022, and after a second surgery was required to remove more cancerous tissue from Lorelai’s skull, it became apparent that the chemo wasn’t working.
Another approach would be needed.
A Promising New Medicine
That approach was called lorlatinib, an oral medication that inhibits the growth of cancer cells in the brain. Lorelai is among the youngest patients to ever take this precision medicine, Zeh said. And so far, it seems to be working. Lorelai’s tumor is no longer growing.
The road ahead remains somewhat shrouded in mystery. Lorelai might have to take lorlatinib for years, or radiation might become a better option once she gets bigger and older. Or who knows, someday soon, scientists — maybe even researchers at Georgia Tech — will come up with something new that works even better to keep Lorelai’s cancer at bay.
But for now, things seem to be better. Lorelai is at home with her brother and sister and even going to preschool for a few hours per week. And while she will always have some neurological symptoms from the trauma her body has endured, one of the main struggles today for Zeh and his wife is one that would not be all that unfamiliar to any parent of a young child: keeping their young daughter from getting hangry.
“One of the main side effects of the medicine is it makes you hungry all the time, so anytime she hears the crinkle of a snack wrapper or something, she comes running,” Zeh said.
Graduating, Finally
On Friday, Zeh will officially become an alumnus of Georgia Tech and the Nunn School, about a year later than he had planned.
After taking a tentative step back toward earning his degree in the summer of 2021, Zeh resumed his sprint toward graduation in Spring 2022 and completed his final two classes in Fall 2022.
He won’t be on hand Friday for Commencement. He’s a working father of young kids, after all, including one who’s been through an awful lot. But he’s nevertheless excited to close out what became an extraordinarily arduous journey toward earning his Master of Science in International Security.
“This medical journey has been an experience I obviously wouldn’t wish on anyone, and I certainly wish our family, and especially Lorelai, wouldn’t have had to go through it,” Zeh said. “But it has just reiterated how many good people there are in the world working to make things better, from the nurses and doctors who are so skillfully caring for Lorelai to the volunteers and advocates who try to make life better for families of kids dealing with cancer.”
Similarly, Zeh said his Nunn School education has given him a new lens through which he can examine his work and think about the knotty issues that complicate technological advancement.
“I’ve always believed science and engineering can make things better and safer,” he said. “I think what I’ve learned from the Nunn School is that there are no easy solutions to the problems the world faces, but I now feel more prepared than ever to help take on those problems and help make the world a better place.”