Jennifer Lara is a high school student at Bell Gardens High School in the city of Bell Gardens, in California. She enjoys science and wants to improve our environment.

Casey Jaeger is an energetic student researcher at Oak Ridge High School who, two years ago, played varsity football and thought of science as a barrier in the way of his athletic goals. He now devotes much of his time researching multiscale temperature data from weather balloons.

I am a sophomore student at Juneau Douglas High School in Juneau, Alaska. I have been intrigued with science all of my life simply because I have always wanted to understand "why." I look forward to having a career in either archeology, anthropology, paleontology, microbiology, genetics or even being an astrophysicist. Essentially, I'm interested in a lot and I'm not quite sure what I want be yet. As long as I'm learning something new and interesting, I'll be more than happy.

My name is Joel Hawksley, and I am a senior at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Kent, Ohio. I have a wide variety of interests, from drumming to photography. I run varsity cross country, serve as the captain of the tennis team, and lead our band's drum line as section leader. For as long as I can remember I have enjoyed taking pictures, and even more so, improving my abilities as a photographer. More recently, my interest in computer programming has grown, starting with self-taught HTML during my middle school years.

It is past 11:00 pm and I am sitting on the living room couch, the textbook in my lap illuminated by a solitary light. Equipped with a pencil and my well-used graphing calculator, I log yet another late night in an attempt to solve my physics homework.

My name is Emily Rinaldi. I am 14 years old and a freshman at Mid Valley High School in Dickson City, PA. As an athlete and young scholar, I have come to appreciate challenges of all kinds. When I have a goal in mind, I put everything I can into turning it into a reality.

Alicia Brown is a senior at Central High School in Independence, Oregon. She has a wide variety of interests both inside and outside the classroom, and has never passed up the opportunity to challenge herself, including electing to spend her sophomore year at the New Mexico Military Institute to "get a more varied experience." She is an avid reader and writer, and admits to a Wikipedia obsession . . . which explains many a late English paper.

Ben is a senior science student at Advanced Technologies Academy Magnet School in Las Vegas, Nevada. He is a gifted student in the sciences who has deep interests in chemistry, astronomy and herpetology (study of reptiles and amphibians). Diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, he finds himself becoming obsessively interested in a single field of study. Currently his interest is in computer science, yet in the past he has focused on herpetology.