The Brown University School of Engineering community is abuzz with excitement over the premiere of Survivor season 48 since it discovered one of its own will be representing.
At last count, Brown alums lead the Ivy League with seven Survivor contestants appearing in 10 different seasons, but Eva Erickson is the first current Ph.D. candidate to take a brief leave of absence from College Hill to participate in the long-running outwit, outplay, outlast reality show that drops contestants in an isolated location, forcing them to work together to survive. Eighteen players compete in challenges to earn rewards and immunity from elimination. Split into tribes, fellow players vote against each other every few days until the few who remain merge into one tribe and compete for the title of sole survivor and a $1 million prize.
Erickson submitted a one-take video to the popular show, recorded in a locker room of Meehan Auditorium after club hockey practice one evening in January 2023, mostly because she thought her new boyfriend, Paul Molnar ’23, might like the idea. Although she had watched the show in her undergraduate days at Georgia Tech, watching more recently with Molnar had made her a bigger fan. It was a Molnar family affair, as he, his brothers and sisters, and even his mother, had all applied to be on the show in different seasons, without a response.
Thankfully now “they are my biggest fans. I had to apologize for stealing their dream, but they were all pumped” when she got the call, she said.
In order to film the show in Fiji last summer, Erickson took a leave of absence from her doctoral studies. Before leaving, her adviser Professor Kenny Breuer asked her to write an abstract and manuscript for the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics conference that he would submit in her absence. “He was super accommodating and supportive for me, because, well, it’s a unique thing to be doing in the middle of a Ph.D.,” she said. Erickson returned, and presented at the conference in November.
Of all Survivor contestants with Brown connections, Erickson is the first from engineering. She is also the first Survivor contestant to be open about her autism diagnosis. “One of my main takeaways, not only from Survivor, is just how proud I am of myself, and all my accomplishments in life. Proud that I’ve been able to share my autism story. That was a big thing for me. In my everyday life, people don’t know that I have autism, because I’m very high functioning, and it doesn’t come up in conversation often, right? ‘Oh, by the way, I’m on the autism spectrum.’
“My biggest message is that autism is not something wrong with you. It is part of who you are, and it’s part of what makes me special and has made me successful in my life. And there are some drawbacks, things that make my life a little more challenging, but I’ve persevered through those. And I want to share that with people who are on the spectrum, or who have children who are on the spectrum. It was a big thing for me to be open and vulnerable in this experience, and I think it is a different portrayal of autism than most people are used to seeing.”
When the premiere airs on Wednesday, February 26 at 8 p.m. ET, Erickson is prepared to be emotional, despite the fact that immediately following she is headed straight onto the ice at Meehan for late practice that night. She is the captain, and lone female, of the men’s hockey club team and will be in the middle of a seven-game spring season during the show’s run. “One thing I’d always thought was so ridiculous watching Survivor was how when people would vote someone off, they would say they love each other so much. And I thought, everyone’s being so dramatic. You’ve only known each other for six days. But the thing is you really do grow to love these people because you are detached from every other single thing in your life. You don’t have any of your support system, no friends, no family. You don’t even know what time of day it is. You’re just out there in the elements, sleeping in the dirt, eating nothing but coconuts. So the connections you build with these people that you’re thrust into the situation with are so deep, so quick.”
Erickson knows something of deep connections. Her community at Brown is made up of her Brown hockey teammates in the evenings, and a tight-knit fluids and thermal sciences community by day. The 2,000 gallon water flume where Erickson’s experiments take place had to be rebuilt over the summer while she was away, and she is aware she skipped out on the manual labor involved. (“Big shoutout to them for doing that while I was gone so I could just get back to work when I returned,” she said.) Both the fluids and hockey groups are vying for the opportunity to watch the show with her, so pending her advancement, community-wide watch parties could be on the horizon.
“I know not many advisers would let one of their Ph.D. students go off and gallivant in Fiji for the summer,” Erickson said. “And especially now when I’m going into another very busy time with the show airing, but Professor Breuer has been very clear with how much he believes in me, that he does not doubt that I’ll get the work done. The flexibility to enjoy this season while also continuing forward in my studies is really incredible.”
Erickson passed her preliminary exam in the fall, so she is about halfway to her educational goal. She was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship last year for her research on vortex induced vibrations of elastically mounted bluff bodies in unsteady vortex wakes. Specifically, she is looking at how seal whisker inspired geometries can suppress vortex induced vibrations to act as underwater sensors, or more simply put, she studies how seals use their whiskers to locate objects in water, and how that can be implemented in sensory technology for the Navy.
She earned her bachelor of science in physics from Georgia Tech in 2022, where she studied how centipedes traverse complex terrains and the different active and passive mechanisms that enable that motion. There she was guided by Professor Daniel Goldman.
“Professor Goldman had a relationship already with Professor Breuer. When they ran into each other at a conference, Kenny thought I sounded perfect for a project he was just starting. Truthfully, I was in the market for my Ph.D., but did not want to apply to Brown at all, because I didn’t want to take the GRE (Graduate Record Examination). But he set up a call with me, and he said, ‘I want you to come here. I'm going to explain why you should come to Brown’ and he told me about this seal whisker project. This was exciting to me because I really wanted to continue on in the bio-inspired robotics sector, since I really loved what I was doing at Georgia Tech. So I figured this was a way to transition from working with live animals to something a bit more mechanical, yet still from a biologically inspired system. It really was just a great fit.”
Although sworn to secrecy on whether or not she holds the million dollar purse for winning, Erickson continues to plan for her future as a scientific researcher. “Initially I wanted to combine my interest in math and animals, and now I’ve done this whole bio-inspired robotics project looking at different animal systems from a physics mindset. Now, I want to combine my other big interest of sports, specifically hockey, with my engineering background. I would love to go into sports equipment design and development. I’d love to do R&D, including vibrational testing for different sports equipment, since now I have that background.”