Stephen Phelps grew up moving. His stepfather was in the military, and the family had lived in El Paso, Germany, Italy, and points in between before settling in Ava the summer before seventh grade so they could be near his mother's family, who had roots in the area. It was at Trico, from seventh grade through graduation in 1988, that Phelps found the two things that would define his life: science and the written word.

Today, Dr. Stephen Phelps is a professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he runs his own research laboratory studying animal behavior, neuroscience, and brain evolution. His work has taken him to Panama, Costa Rica, and the prairies of southern Illinois. He has published in Scientific American, written an op-ed for the New York Times, and contributed essays to Aeon, a British magazine focused on the intersection of science and culture. A book for general audiences about the biology of close relationships is due out in February of 2028, and it will include, he confirmed, a couple of chapters set in Trico.

The path from Ava to Austin was not a straight line. After graduating from Trico, Phelps attended the University of Illinois, where he started in biomedical engineering before discovering a deeper pull toward biology and switching his major to physiology, finishing his undergraduate degree in 1992. He stayed at Illinois for a master's degree in biology, researching an animal model for Parkinson's disease while developing a broader interest in brain evolution and animal behavior. In 1994, he came to UT Austin for his PhD in what was then called integrative biology, completing it in 1999.

From there, Phelps held postdoctoral positions at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and at Emory University in Atlanta, where he was part of the National Science Foundation's Center for Behavioral Neuroscience. In 2002, he joined the faculty at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he launched his own lab and began the research threads he continues today. In 2010, he returned to UT Austin as a faculty member and has been there ever since.

His labs have studied two unusual species. One is the singing mouse, a Central American rodent that rises on its hind legs and produces elaborate vocalizations. Phelps and his team use what is known about the brains of lab mice to understand how the singing mouse's brain produces and perceives those social signals, offering a window into questions about language and communication. The other species is the prairie vole, a small rodent native to Illinois that is notable among rodents for forming lifelong pair bonds. Phelps studies those bonds to understand a question he calls one of the most exciting in his work: why do meaningful social connections make us healthier, and how does that protection work biologically?

Phelps teaches an undergraduate human biology course for pre-med students, a graduate seminar on brain, behavior, and evolution, and a graduate course on the biology of bonding. He also co-teaches a course called Scientists as Writers, which guides graduate students in science toward writing for general audiences. It is a course that reflects the thread running all the way back to Trico, where teachers Carol Hohman and Jacqueline Carruthers helped shape both his love of writing and his ability to communicate. He wrote a weekly column for the County Journal as a student, took a journalism class, and worked on the yearbook. "My interest in writing and my abilities to communicate my work first got expression at Trico," he said. Writing has mattered more than most people might expect. Grant proposals to the National Science Foundation face funding rates around eight percent, and the ability to make a compelling case in a tight space, he said, has been critical to his success.

Phelps is also a member of Trico's Hall of Achievement, and when he was honored, a group of friends from his school days made the trip from across the country to be there.

For a kid who moved from place to place through most of his childhood, Trico gave Dr. Stephen Phelps something that stayed with him: a serious science education, a love of language, and a community of friends who showed up for him all those years later.