High school student got accepted into University of Washington

It is a very special feeling when your trainee has been accepted into the University. We have spend substantial amount of time working together with Sasha Batoukova, who was my high school intern in 2020 - 2021. The story goes back to 2020, when I gave an online presentation about computational neuroscience at the school Lucky Pen in Redmond, Washington. During the presentation I was talking to kids about what it is to do the computational neuroscience research and how is it related to biology.

After this the high school student Sasha Batoukova has contacted me asking if I could supervise her high school science project. She was very eager to learn about computational neuroscience, was interested in programming, so I we decided to organize a project together. Together we wrote a little description about modeling of human hippocampal neurons and epilepsy, similar to the work I have been working on at Allen Institute.

During the whole year of 2021 we have been working together with Sasha, where she learned how to program, analyze the results of computer simulations and interpret the biological hypothesis in her work. With the results of this project she won the 4th place at Washington state competition in computational biology. Therefore it was a pleasure for me to write her the recommendation letters to different schools.

And recently I got the news that Sasha has been successfully accepted into University of Washington Computer Science department! I am so glad for her I hope our computational biology project would help her to move forward in studying computer science and biology. It is so encouraging to have students like that are pushing the envelope of what is possible and are eager to learn more and more. Well done, Sasha and good luck with the next steps of your academic journey!