These things happen to other people: Jennifer Kalish, 18, was eating a peanut butter sandwich in the Bryn Mawr School's cafeteria last year. The high school junior needed a science project, but her brain was bare.
In one of those fluky acts that often jump-start ideas, Jennifer looked at the fruit juice container under her nose. She took it to the science lab, knifed it open and found aluminum lining. Jennifer wondered how aluminum in food containers is absorbed into the food we eat? Is the metal toxic? And so what if it is?
"In science," Jennifer says, "you can't get bored because the questions never end."
From months of heads-up lab work, Jennifer was able to identify new genes in yeast cells that protect against aluminum toxicity. Her work won a $10,000, eighth-place scholarship last month in the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search in Washington. While there, Jennifer -- who's also a point guard and black belt -- chatted with a Nobel Prize winner and even firmly shook the president's hand.
What more could this young woman want?
"I still want to know what aluminum does in a human cell," Jennifer says.
She's a self-confessed perfectionist, a practical young woman with Big Questions on her mind. But today, the last Wednesday in March, Jennifer Melissa Kalish is thinking about clothes.
For the first time in her school years, she is wondering what to wear. After spring break at the private Bryn Mawr School, seniors get to wear street clothes after being in uniform for twelve grades.
She's also wondering what to wear at college. But more important, where to go to college? Of the nine schools she applied to, Jennifer recently was accepted at her first choice -- Harvard University. The Baltimore native might be Boston-bound.
Jennifer got serious about science in the sixth grade, when she started poking around physics books. In the eighth grade at Bryn Mawr, she worked on her first science project, which concerned the conservation of mass in a chemical reaction. But still, the 13-year-old girl had all these questions.
"Jennifer came to talk to me. At that point, I think she wanted to know what a black hole was," says science department chair Stephanie Miller, Jennifer's mentor and science teacher. "We have a lot of girls interested in science, but it's uncommon for them to follow it through."
Jennifer was a shy girl, says Mrs. Miller, but she could be touchingly expressive. "She'd walk up to me, hand me a rose, say 'Here,' and walk away."
On the campus of Bryn Mawr in Baltimore, Jennifer scurries to a yearbook committee meeting. Proofs are missing, and the yearbook adviser appears to be imploding. Jennifer is the faculty editor, in charge of making sure all the teachers get their pictures in the yearbook and hopefully with their eyes open. Jennifer isn't worried. The job will get done.
Above all, Jennifer has become a time manager. She doesn't have enough time to do everything she wants: "I could spend 10 years figuring out how to do more than I do now and do it all at once," she says.
Jennifer has baby brown eyes and a smile that starts slowly and then peaks into a wonderful thing, to be frank. She's 5 feet 6 and has long, strong fingers. Both features are good for basketball. Last year, she was the starting point guard for Bryn Mawr; this year, she was second-team. She's a right-hander who can shoot left.
Favorite things
After the yearbook meeting, it's time to get her picture taken with the basketball team, but the photo shoot is canceled for some reason. Quick, back inside to an advanced physics workshop. Six young women, looking like grown-up Winnie Coopers from "The Wonder Years," talk out the problems with the teacher. Jennifer is not a young woman who thinks out loud. She smiles at her friends' one-liners, but offers none. She doesn't banter or bubble. She does the physics questions and re-loads her backpack when the class ends.
She has about 10 minutes of free time -- time enough for the Barbara Walters treatment:
Favorite pet: Beta, a Siamese fighting fish. Put two males in the tank and they eat each other. Don't read anything into that, she says.
Favorite basketball teams: Duke. Chicago Bulls.
Favorite extracurricular activity: Hard to say because Jennifer has a big bag of interests. She was in ballet for five years. She played the piano and violin for a while. She loves astronomy and will do her senior science project at the Space Telescope Science Institute at Hopkins.
"She was not the type of child who was interested in one thing," says Jennifer's mother, Michele Kalish of Pikesville -- a former high school science teacher. "I got her a chemistry set once for Christmas, but she didn't spend a lot of time with it. She liked Barbie dolls."
Jennifer kick-boxed, once. She likes tennis but admittedly isn't very good. She was a camp counselor. Jennifer is also a peer counselor and is on the prom committee at Bryn Mawr.
She started karate when she was 8, mainly for self-defense, and was the only girl in her class. That's it -- Jennifer really loves karate and even teaches it to kids in Pikesville. She earned a first-degree black belt when she was 16.
Vices?: "No," she says. "Sorry."
Favorite movie: "Schindler's List." Jennifer, a devout Jew, cried when she saw the movie, but not when she visited the concentration camps in Poland. "I was too numb to cry when I was there."
Worst grade: The A-student got a C on a calculus test last year. She says she didn't beat herself up over it.
What do you do for fun?: Spend time with her parents and sister, 14-year-old Danielle. Spend serious phone time with friends. Rent videos -- movies at the theater cost $7, after all, Jennifer says. Likes the beach and the Inner Harbor.
Has life changed after winning a Westinghouse scholarship?: "I don't get as much sleep."
Explain "Whitewater": She can't.
Jennifer reads her watch. Time to go. This school year, Jennifer received permission from Bryn Mawr to do an independent study project to test the toxicity of aluminum. She was allowed to re-arrange her class schedule to leave Bryn Mawr by 1:30 p.m. so she could drive her two-toned Delta 88 to Johns Hopkins University.
She went to work last fall in a seventh-floor lab of the Division of Toxicological Science at the university's School of Hygiene and Public Health. The title is almost bigger than the lab, which seems to have every gizmo except a microscope. For Jennifer, the lab was intimidating -- for about a week or so.
"She was looking for a lab, and it was a perfect match," says Dr. Valer
ia Culotta, who has guided Jennifer's experiments at Johns Hopkins. Jennifer reminds her a little of herself when she was in high school and in love with science. "Except I didn't pursue it to the point of going to a lab at a graduate school," Dr. Culotta says.
In the Hopkins lab
Dr. Culotta's lab is developing a genetic approach to identifying genes that protect against metal toxicity. So the work lends itself to Jennifer's continuing experiments with aluminum. From her work here, Jennifer's scholarship-winning "A Molecular Genetic Approach to Understanding Aluminum" was achieved. Of the 1,600 Westinghouse entries nationwide, Jennifer was the only finalist from Maryland.
Before Jennifer gets in, graduate student Paula Lapinskas is working in the lab. The two have become friends. "In many ways, she's just this teen-ager who happens to have this thing she does," Paula says.
Jennifer walks into the lab around 2 p.m. She missed a week here after her Washington trip because she needed to "settle down," which is as close to vacation as she gets these swamped days.
"Jen, they let you out of uniform," Dr. Culotta says. "I like you out of uniform."
Jennifer smiles and, just maybe, blushes. Then, she starts doing things, such as streaking out yeast on plates. Paula brings up TTC the subject of Bryn Mawr's prom. The two do talk about guys sometimes, although the lab isn't the place for a lot of personal chit-chat.
On the subject of prom, Westinghouse-winner Jennifer Kalish says she hasn't decided whom she is going with, but she does plan on going.
"I am normal," she says.