Although I began studying physics at school in the 7th grade, my interest in the subject came largely from reading popular science books. One such book was called Einstein for Everyone; a slim volume, it provided a non-technical rundown of all of the major areas in modern physics, from atomic physics all the way up' to cosmology. I was particularly intrigued with the book's description of quantum mechanics --- the thought of Schrodinger’s cat’ being both alive and dead simultaneously was fascinating to me, as was the notion that measuring something could change the outcome … In quantum mechanics, the state of a system can be fully represented by its wave function.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been both fascinated and frightened by that full range of malicious, deadly human diseases that have no cure. The possibility of one’s body turning against itself, waging war on its own cells and disrupting the complex biological processes that keep us healthy terrified me. I found the best way to confront my fears was to simply learn what causes debilitating diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease what goes wrong in our body to cause these horrible maladies, and why.

Cancer is a very elusive subject; my textbooks would often place approach the topic with a disclaimer that our knowledge of cancer was evolving. And through this, I became aware that though the collection of data itself is rigorous and exact, the actual formation of hypotheses and methods to test them is an unsure process. Specifically, the results we receive can be surprising and, at times, disappointing. I had many trips in the road during my first official laboratory experience.

Being part of research is such an amazing experience. You only need to be passionate about something and excited to learn more and willing to do the work. Research can be difficult sometimes after all, experiments are learning experiences, and things don’t always go as planned but it’s definitely worth it. You get to learn from a new perspective and actually contribute to what you’re learning about; you can find new interests or further ones you already have.

The parents didn’t send their kids because there was a male teacher! Scoffing at the absurdity, my disgruntled father strolled into the house, booming with another story to share from his after-school program. As an elementary educator, he fills up our conversations at the dinner table about his daily interactions with the students and their parents; my usual routine consists of quiet nods and smiles. But this particular story got me curious.

During an evening quantum computing seminar at Portland State University, Professor Marek Perkowski discussed the relatively new area of quantum machine learning. As the lecture continued, I gradually realized that I had come across a field with an ideal intersection between my passions for mathematics and machine learning. Following this seminar, I started reading published works in the field which introduced quantum analogs of algorithms ranging from support vector machines to k-nearest neighbors … My proposed quantum machine learning algorithm is a novel approach which converts the learning samples into an incompletely specified Boolean function for classification problems.

My advice to high school students looking to work on a research project that combines science and mathematics is to be invested in learning a lot of new things and keep an open mind as high schoolers, there’s a lot of mathematics we are unfamiliar with, and sometimes it’s easy to get overwhelmed. However, I would say that the beauty of combined science and math research is that you learn so much about mathematical theory that can be applied to the science a double-pronged approach, if you will!

One of the best presents I have ever received was a book entitled Girls Think of Everything on the day of my fifth grade graduation. Girls Think of Everything chronicles various women who have made world changing scientific discoveries. This book inspired my clueless, ten year old self to one day have such an impact on the world. Thus my passion for research began and has continued to influence my high school and college interests.

Economics was a subject I first discovered in high school a class that all students were required to take which inexplicitly became my favorite class of the year. I was enthralled by the idea of using mathematics to model the behavior of individuals and firms across the country. Until I met my mentor Professor Cheng-Zhong Qin, that is how I saw economics: a collection of simple and elegant theories that described all of economic activity.