Sohini RamachandranPORTER GIFFORD
Sohini Ramachandran was 15 years old when she first walked into mathematical geneticist Marcus Feldman’s laboratory at Stanford University. Feldman, had advised Ramachandran’s older sister, Raga, a few years earlier. “I thought Raga was exceptionally smart, but she told me that Sohini was even smarter,” he says. Feldman ended up offering the younger Ramachandran a research position in his lab for the summer.
So after her junior year of high school, Ramachandran studied genetic variation in Arabidopsis. Based on a mathematical analysis of DNA sequences, she discovered that the plants’ spread around the globe mirrored human movement: Arabidopsis entered the Americas as humans were crossing the Bering land bridge. The research won her fourth place in the 1998 national Westinghouse Science Talent Search (now the ...
