Featured above: Jacob and Calla Brooks are pictured on HPU’s campus in 2021 after a surprise proposal!
This story is featured in the 2023 edition of the HPU Magazine.
Listen to the audio version of this story,
Narrated by Tyler Rumsey, Class of 2024
As he stood hidden from view inside HPU’s Culp Planetarium, Dr. Jacob Brooks held a ring in his hand.
“I’m not losing this!” he kept telling himself.
Calla Telzrow, Brooks’ girlfriend at the time, sat by herself a few rows up. She thought she was reviewing a new planetarium video. But she was surprised to see that the six-minute video contained photos and testimonials from their “boy meets girl” love story.
Brooks, a physics major, and Telzrow, a biology major, met during their freshman year at HPU. They studied together and became friends. Their friendship, though, grew into a relationship before they ventured to graduate school. Telzrow got a Ph.D. in genetics and microbiology from Duke University; and Brooks got a Ph.D. in physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
On a Saturday in January 2021, they came back to HPU, where Telzrow thought she was part of an alumni interview panel. Instead, Brooks led her to the Culp Planetarium inside the Wanek School of Natural Sciences and proposed to Telzrow. Brooks teamed up with Dr. Brad Barlow, director of the Culp Planetarium and astrophysics professor, to plan the proposal.
She said yes. They married in June of 2022.
It was a big moment. But Brooks’ life has been full of big moments at HPU.
Brooks arrived on campus from Monkton, Maryland, a tiny community north of Baltimore, Maryland. He found a mentor in Dr. Briana Fiser, chair of HPU’s physics department. He worked with her on her biophysics research, and he collaborated with other students to develop an asteroid-chipping instrument for NASA.
In December 2015, Brooks graduated with a degree in physics and minors in chemistry and mathematics. At HPU, he found a career, a sea of friends and a chance to work with NASA scientists at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Last year, when he heard about the open visiting professor position in the Wanek School of Natural Sciences, he applied and got the job. He came back to his alma mater to teach. A few months later, the same month he defended his dissertation, HPU hired him full time.
Brooks is now educating others on the campus that first educated him, and Telzrow, now Calla Brooks, is a senior proposal specialist at PPD, part of Thermo Fisher Scientific.
“I did a lot of growing up here,” Brooks says. “I got my education here; I met my wife here. So, it’s comforting when I see students and remember when I was in their shoes. I want them to have an equally good experience as I had.”