Photo by Selma O’Malley for The Lafayette

After graduation, Tyler Roberts ’25 will head to his home state of California for medical school at the UC Irvine School of Medicine.

The summer before his junior year at Lafayette College, Pepper Prize winner Tyler Roberts ‘25 was determined to yield the best results for his time on campus.

He researched the reactivity of gold-containing compounds as an EXCEL scholar, rode along for medical emergencies as an EMT and participated in preseason training as a member of the football team.

The final results? His research was published in the Organometallics journal, he gained invaluable knowledge as he prepped for medical school and the football team won the 2023 Patriot League Title.

“I just feel very blessed to have had those opportunities, and if I didn’t take advantage of it, then I feel like I’m just sort of wasting that,” he said.

For Roberts, the “Lafayette ideal” is someone who embraces every opportunity. He welcomed this mindset as a first-year student, when a course registration mishap led him to pursue dual degrees in biochemistry and neuroscience.

“I love chemistry and sort of how that interacts with biology, but then also the brain is just fascinating,” he said. “We know so much about science stuff, what we still don’t know about the brain is crazy.”

His academic and research advisor, chemistry department head Chip Nataro, recalled Roberts telling him he would be pursuing both majors.

“Back of my mind, I’m saying, ‘Well, good for you for thinking, but boy, I wonder if we’re gonna be having a different conversation in a month when all of a sudden college hits you,’” Nataro said. “But we never had that conversation.”

Nataro has observed Roberts to be someone who’s “willing to go above and beyond to accomplish a goal.”

Roberts gives back to the campus community in his role as a student-athlete peer mentor, which he described as “so rewarding.”

“I want to use the opportunities that I’ve been given to then give opportunities to others and just pay it forward and help raise up everything else around me,” he said.

He will be heading to medical school at the UC Irvine School of Medicine, in his native California, this August. While he is still figuring out what his specialty will be, he said he is drawn to both neurosurgery and emergency medicine.

“I love the idea of the adrenaline rush with that, and just having to constantly be on the go and ready for anything,” Roberts said. “I feel like it also kind of excites the athlete part of me.”

On the field, Roberts was a part of the football program’s offensive scout team — mimicking the plays of the opposing team each week to train Lafayette’s defense — which he saw as an “opportunity to help our team get better and help us find a way to win.”

“It’s been immensely helpful for learning that even when you think you can’t do anymore, or you don’t want to go anymore, that there’s so much that you can still attain,” he said of football. “When your body will quit versus when your mind will quit, or if you can push past your mind, your body will take you so much farther.”

He earned the nickname “The Wizard” in his freshman season because he “knew the playbook better than anybody else in the room,” according to teammate Keller Gammons ’25.

“From the start, he battled through adversity, he tore his ACL his freshman year during fall camp, never really let it hold him back,” Gammons said. “He was scootering around campus, going to high-level courses, making all the practices, filming everything and then he battled back really fast and got back for the sophomore year.”

When Roberts found out he was this year’s Pepper Prize winner, he was “overwhelmed with the emotion.”

“Knowing what it means to win that and to all the kind of honor and responsibility and knowing everyone that’s come before me that has done that was just a humbling moment,” he said.

While Roberts is waiting for his end-of-semester workload to settle before nailing down the details, he hopes to highlight setting aside differences in his commencement speech.

“The world’s full of different grays and remembering and recognizing that, I think would just be a good thing for all of us to step back, take a deep breath, look at the situation,” he said. “This is the world. We don’t have to put it into these boxes. We can take these different gradients of gray.”