Twenty-three-year-old Alayna Westcom stood onstage in a white dress with a blue atom emblem, blue shoes, and lab glasses. On a table covered by a white tablecloth, she added hydrogen peroxide and potassium iodide to a little soap and then stepped back to watch. "Don't...

When Rashmi Shah was young, she spent time helping her parents, both scientists, process and catalog samples of plant matter that they had collected. This wasn't a one-time occurrence. Growing up in Nepal in a math-and-science household, science and research were a nat...

Kathryne Jansen's parents encouraged her to pursue a traditional career path. Like many parents, they wanted her to go to college, get a degree, and go off to work in a field with job security, good pay, and solid benefits. She tried this, applying to Berry, a private...

Carmen Cabana wouldn't say that she comes from a particularly artistic family, but the inspiration for her cinematography career did begin when she was a child in Colombia. Born with a leg issues, she had to wear a cast on both legs for a number of years, so she grew u...

Lisa Goel was born and raised in a rural town in Mississippi. Her father, a general and vascular surgeon as well as a family physician, moved to this small town because of its great need for doctors. She was inspired by his “daily service and dedication toward helping...

Mercedes Cornelius was the kind of child who ended up in the principal’s office once in a while—but at the same time she was smart. She loved to read and spent hours at the library finding every reason she could to stay there, even working there for a time. She was ver...

Katherine Young will tell you that her work as a graphic artist only has the chance to influence people for one second. Much of her work is seen in passing, out of the corner of the eye—it’s on Facebook and Instagram, in print magazines, on postcards, posters, or e-ma...

When we think of engineering in the aviation industry, we tend to focus on the development of new aircraft, but what about the planes that are already out there, those that could find new life with some retrofitting? Danielle Vardaro came to Boeing after earning her un...

Karen Rockwell may have been good at math and science as a kid, but that doesn’t mean she had any interest in becoming an engineer. There was no way she was going to spend her days sitting alone behind a computer. But then her older brother set her straight. If she was...

Hope Nicholson is passionate about comic books, and she’s made a career out of being the kind of fangirl who loves comics from the 1930s as much as those published online today. Nicholson is a writer, editor, publisher, and producer dedicated to “creating spaces for st...