After Escaping ‘Torture’ and Poverty as a Kid, Professor Has Helped Thousands of Struggling Students (Exclusive)

• Raised in poverty, Dr. Billy Hudson was tortured by his parents while growing up in rural Arkansas
• More than six decades later, he still gets emotional while reflecting on how he escaped that dark place with the help of a high school teacher
• Now a biochemistry professor, Hudson, 83, has helped more than 3,300 students with his STEM education program, Aspirnaut

It’s May 1958, and 16-year-old Billy Hudson is bloody and battered lying in the dirt near his rural Arkansas home. He’s clutching a shotgun, trying to decide whether to kill himself or the father who abused him.

Tears still form in Dr. Billy Hudson’s eyes when he reflects on that moment more than six decades ago — and on how he escaped that dark place with the help of a high school teacher who recognized his potential.

“It was a turning point,” Hudson, 83, now a biochemistry professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and an expert in kidney disease research, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “I went from no hope to sunshine overnight.”

For the past 17 years Hudson has been offering that same sense of possibility to other students facing hardship — abuse, poverty or just a lack of access to advanced education — through a nonprofit he cofounded called Aspirnaut. The goal of the organization is to encourage kids to “aspire, seek and achieve” through STEM education.

Since 2007, Aspirnaut has brought 362 mostly rural students in need from 34 states to do summer research at Vanderbilt and reached another 3,000-plus students in Arkansas through science and distance-learning programs. “We show people a pathway lined with opportunities,” Hudson says, “so they can dream.”

Growing up on a farm without running water or electricity in tiny Grapevine, Ark., Hudson had little exposure to the outside world, let alone lofty aspirations. As quiet as it was in the woods surrounding his family’s home, inside was chaos. “I was tortured,” he says.

Hudson’s father, Cecil, a logger, had a ferocious temper that scared even his own parents, who lived nearby. He unleashed his fury regularly on Hudson’s mother, Gladys. When Hudson was 7, his father attacked his mother with a hammer. “I tried to push him off, and he threw me across the room,” Hudson recalls. “I saw a lot of that.”

The oldest of three, Hudson took the brunt of his dad’s rage: “There was something about me he didn’t like.” His mother, meanwhile, expected his protection. When he was 12, she asked him, “If he starts to kill us, can you kill him?” Hudson replied, “That would ruin my life.”

But later he told her he could do it. “From that day forward I had a loaded shotgun under my bed. That was torture [too],” he says. “You don’t know what’s going to happen: ‘Is this the day I got to get my shotgun?’ ”

The day he finally did was after a beating unlike any other. Hudson was 16 and had already dropped out of school, unable to keep up with classes and dealing with his home life. He was driving his brother and sister home to feed their chickens when he accidentally ran off the gravel road into a ditch before pulling the truck out again.

His father was livid when he got home: “You’re going to pay!” His eyes were wild, and he beat his son for half an hour with a branch from an oak tree. “It was like I had no value,” Hudson says. He fled to his grandparents’ house, but they turned him away, saying: “There’s nothing we can do. Your father would jump us.”

So Hudson got his gun. “The thought was, ‘I’ll kill myself. I’m out,’ ” he says. Then he reconsidered and decided, “It should be him.” Hudson doesn’t remember exactly what happened next; his memory of the days that followed is blank. But he knows his gun never went off. And he knows a history teacher who’d seen his potential in school — and was aware of the trouble he faced at home —stepped in to offer an unexpected escape.

The teacher helped Hudson enroll in a summer course at a college out of town, despite his not having a high school diploma. All these years later, “I don’t know what he saw in me,” Hudson says. “If somebody thinks you have value, you can climb mountains.”

For more on Hudson’s story, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.

He arrived at Henderson State Teachers College with no money. He stayed unnoticed in an empty dorm room and found people who helped him. A cafeteria dietitian realized he wore the same clothes every day, offered him a job and became a surrogate mom. And a science teacher gave Hudson a round of applause after he scored a top test grade, then became a mentor: “What do you think that did for a young guy with nothing?”

Hudson took high school courses while studying at Henderson and graduated with his high school class the following year. (Following Hudson’s last confrontation with his dad, Cecil didn’t threaten him again and even developed a grudging respect for him.) Hudson eventually went on to earn his doctorate from the University of Iowa, and after he married his wife, Julie, a pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist, 36 years ago, the couple took jobs at Vanderbilt.

Hudson did groundbreaking work there on a protein central to kidney disease. But he knew he wanted to give back, so he and Julie, along with his sister Ann, an educator, and his brother Johnny K., an accountant, set up Aspirnaut.

At first they offered mobile Wi-Fi learning on the same Arkansas bus route Hudson rode as a kid, providing science lessons to students on their long trips back and forth to class. Plans expanded to include a summer program, bringing kids from rural schools to conduct research at Vanderbilt — and giving them wellness and mental health support as well.

“We put our arms around these kids and say, ‘You’re a good person,’” says Hudson. “My parents never did that.”

One of the first Aspirnauts was Cody Stothers. Born when his mother was in prison, Stothers was raised by his grandmother in poverty in rural Arkansas, not far from Hudson’s hometown. Traveling to do research at Vanderbilt as a high school student was “all very foreign to me,” says Stothers, now 33 and an ER doctor in Cincinnati. “It was daunting. But Dr. Hudson understood what I was going through and made it not so insurmountable,” he adds.

Knowing Hudson’s background, students sometimes opened up about their own experiences with abuse. And over time that reignited his trauma.

“I had my history and theirs on top of it,” he says. By 2013, he and Julie, who is Aspirnaut’s executive director, realized he was suicidal again. “She’s wonderful,” Hudson says of his wife, who ensures that student Aspirnauts are supported with mental health resources along with learning opportunities. “She recognized my crisis.”

For the first time, Hudson sought therapy and confronted his painful past: “My psychologist said, ‘Billy, you can’t heal from an empty cup.’ ” Today, thanks to his work with the program, Hudson says, “I have a reason to live.”

For Aspirnauts like Raymond Zhang, 17, a senior at Wynne High School in Arkansas, which is the recipient of the latest Aspirnaut project —a state-of-the-art lab that collaborates with Vanderbilt on diabetes research, the program has been life-changing. “It opens people’s minds,” says Zhang, who recently earned a full ride to Vanderbilt. “It’s a beacon of hope.” Adds Wynne science teacher Clay Spann, “Dr. Hudson is passionate about reaching out to rural America.”

More than 140 Aspirnauts have gone on to become doctors or have earned Ph.D.s or other advanced degrees, and more than 50 work in a STEM field.

“It makes me want to cry,” Hudson says with pride. “I see myself in those kids—their trauma, their pain and their success.” But, he adds, the work isn’t done: “There are millions more out there. We can do more.”

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.