Ayesha Bose has always been interested in science.
Starting in 10th grade, she conducted research on complex search algorithms at the Jisan Research Institute in Los Angeles, a weekly commitment for which she has made the 200-mile trek every Sunday for three years.

She has also worked at the SPAWAR Research Laboratories on a glove that would act as an interface for a computer in hazardous environments. She created a version of the glove that could work in the absence of gravity.

In the summer of 2010, she attended the Research Science Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she worked on an underwater robot.

She is captain of her Academic League team and president of Science Olympiad. Her robotics team finished 3rd out of 60 regionally.

Bose wants to pursue engineering. She is leaning toward attending MIT, although she has been accepted at Caltech and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and received likely designations from Yale, Cornell, Columbia, UC Berkeley and UC Davis.

Carrie Cao says that "science without boundaries is enchanting."

In 10th grade, she began an internship in the UCSD Chemistry department where she realized that experimental deadlock would plague her work designing a method to construct a flexible nanostructured optical sensor to detect substances like environmental pollutants or proteins.

After three years and hundreds of trials, success eluded her, so she took a new direction designing her own spectrometer set-up to automatically monitor the polymer infiltration step in real time, figuring out a new way of using continuously changing spectra to see exactly what was happening in the nanopores. After much tweaking of her new technique, she not only pinpointed the optimum conditions for building the polymer sensors she desired, but her multiple variable response analysis provided previously unattained control over the diffusion process into a nonporous material.

She has been honored with several awards for her work including first place at the California State Science Fair and her research is being published. She states that if failure has taught her anything, it's that there is beauty in these obstacles outshining even the rarest exhilaration of success, which makes science so worthwhile.

Her top university choices are Harvard, MIT or Stanford to which she has been accepted early action.

Anisha Mudaliar states she has always excelled in the most advanced math and science classes.

She has pursued her passion for science through internships, research grants and competitions at the regional and national level, such as Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Madras Diabetes Research Foundation, Taking Control of Your Diabetes, and the Young Epidemiology Scholars Competition where she was a national finalist.

She received grants from Intel and STEM Research, placed 1st in the science fair and 1st and 2nd place for Excellence in Epidemiology at the Science Olympiad. She believes science is the opportunity to not only master the known, but also to imagine the unknown.

Mudaliar says that scientific research affords the opportunity to combine intellectual vigor, global ethics and a spirit of freedom in order to advance the greater good of humankind and society. She has been a volunteer helping children in Ecuador and Kenya and young lepers in India.

Mudaliar has been accepted to Stanford, Harvard, Yale, UCLA, Berkeley and UCSD – her top choices are Stanford, Harvard and Yale.

During Julia Pian's 2010 winter break, she researched the quest to conjure a synthetic cell and was fascinated by the idea and the science behind it. A team of scientists successfully created a synthetic genome later that year. This has further inspired her to pursue a career in science.

Earlier the same year, after countless hours of editing articles from a group of 7th to 12th graders, and fundraising, among other things, she worked with a team to publish The Bishop's School Science Magazine: B I Sci. As founding editor, she is currently working on the second issue, and says she particularly enjoys learning about areas of science about which her peers are passionate.

She was also a summer intern at the SanfordBurnham Medical Research Institute in the Price Lab for Quantitative Microscopy where she found herself working with microscopes in a bioengineering lab. She says it was enjoyable experiencing life as a bioengineer, and hopes to continue research while attending university and beyond.

Julia is fascinated by the combination of biology and engineering principles that bioengineering draws upon to create useful models for the world. She has been accepted to MIT, CalTech and UCLA.

Elise knew from the age of 3 that she wanted to be in medicine. At the time, she was determined to become a veterinarian, but over the years that passion transformed to a focus as a medical doctor. She has pursued medicine in every possible way.

Two years ago, she enrolled in an enrichment program for medically inclined students where she toured both a medical school and a hospital, observed a total knee replacement and interacted with physicians during their daily work. This past summer, she was fortunate to work as the only high school intern in a UCSD cancer research laboratory where she was introduced to a nanotechnology-based cancer vaccine and assisted with in-vitro vaccine research that was being conducted for leukemia, breast and multiple myeloma cancer strains.

Circumstances in her family have also exposed her to medicine. Elise says that the combination of her research and personal experiences have solidified her desire to pursue a career in medicine.

She has already been accepted to Dartmouth, Cornell, Vanderbilt, UCLA, Washington University in St. Louis, and Emory University and is still waiting to hear from several others.

Click here to see prior Pinnacle Scholarship winners