Sarah Usman

Sarah Usman is a senior at West-Windsor Plainsboro High School North. As President and co-founder of her school's Muslim Student Association, she has worked with multiple non-profit organizations to advocate for social justice in the local community as well as unify the Muslim student body at her school. She is a member of her school's chapter of the Waksman Student Scholars Program, where she conducts DNA sequence analysis of genes from Landoltia punctata (Duckweed) using bioinformatic web-based tools to determine its viability as a potential source of biofuel. Sarah is authoring a paper on cardiovascular disease prevalence in South Asian populations by conducting a literary analysis of multiple publications and contacting various international health departments and medical departments to obtain cholesterol and lipid data. She is currently training to become an Emergency Medical Technician and hopes to volunteer at her local rescue squad. In the future, Sarah aspires to use her interests in computational biology and bioinformatics to create screening technologies that can facilitate in early detection of chronic illnesses.