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Graduates to watch in the class of 2016
These students are 11 reasons why the future looks bright.
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Meet some shining stars
Their heart, talent and toughness will likely make a difference.Thousands of young Mainers are making one of life’s great transitions this month at high school graduations across the state.
Beneath each cap and gown is a story of struggle and triumph, in the classroom, on the playing field and beyond. Some have wrestled with self-doubt, disability or depression. All are hoping for a bright future.
Here are the stories of 11 remarkable members of the class of 2016, including a set of siblings. We asked high school administrators in southern Maine to identify seniors who, because of heart, talent or toughness, are likely to make a difference in the world.
They include three children of immigrants and some from nontraditional families. Their career goals range from raising pigs and driving trucks to healing people and playing the blues. They have already accomplished and overcome much to earn their diplomas, including war, poverty and the loss of parents. And they want to do more.
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Meredith Hawkins, Yarmouth High School
Meredith Hawkins, a graduating senior at Yarmouth High School, sits by a banner signed by her fellow students that raises awareness of the harmful effects of the word "retard" in the school community and beyond. Meredith has started a number of school programs to promote understanding and inclusion of students with developmental disabilities. Jill Brady/Staff PhotographerMeredith Hawkins was young when she realized that some words can hurt.
As a seventh-grader at Harrison Middle School in Yarmouth, she launched a campaign, “Spread the Word to End the Word,” to stop the derogatory use of “retard” and “retarded” in the town’s schools.
“It was especially prevalent when I was in seventh grade,” Hawkins recalled. “It was used a lot, often without any intention to hurt people, but it really does offend some people.”
Hawkins displayed a campaign banner in the middle school hallway and asked students to sign a pledge to remove the R-word from their vocabulary. Students embraced the effort, and it became a yearly effort among seventh-graders.
In eighth grade, Hawkins started the annual Young Athletes Festival, a program for kids ages 2 to 7 that helps them develop motor skills and introduces them to competitive play. While it aims to prepare children for the Special Olympics, it’s open to children with or without intellectual disabilities.
At Yarmouth High School, she started the Youth Activation Council, a club including students with special needs that works on education and acceptance of people’s differences. She and another student started a lunch buddy program, which partners upperclassmen with students with special needs who often end up sitting alone.
And she helped to start a “unified” basketball team at the high school to participate in the interscholastic program co-sponsored by Special Olympics and the Maine Principals’ Association. Unified teams include students with developmental disabilities and nonvarsity students without disabilities.
Hawkins was a three-sport athlete at Yarmouth High who speaks Spanish and graduated magna cum laude. She plans to study international relations at Boston College, with a possible minor in social work and psychology. She hopes to further interests she developed on service trips to Ghana in Africa with her mother’s Yale University alumni group, and to Nicaragua in Central America and Appalachia in West Virginia with her church youth group.
She credits her parents, Eileen, a nurse practitioner, and Craig, a surgeon, with showing her how to live fully and help others. “My parents have always allowed me to explore a lot of different opportunities and do whatever I’m interested in,” Hawkins said. “They’re extremely hard-working, but they’re also amazing human beings.”
– By Kelley Bouchard
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Fred Pierce, Greely High School
Greely High's Fred Pierce, a heavy equipment enthusiast, says he turned his academic life around after connecting with a regional vocational center, where "I was happy to be doing ... what I want to do in the future." He plans to work at his father's North Yarmouth excavation company. Carl D. Walsh/Staff PhotographerFred Pierce wasn’t getting much out of Greely High School before his junior year. Halfway through 10th grade, the Cumberland student was failing a few classes and wondering whether he’d graduate on time, let alone get his name on the honor roll.
Then he visited the Westbrook Regional Vocational Center, which also serves students from Buxton, Falmouth, Gorham, Hollis, Limington, Scarborough, Standish and Windham. He heard a teacher explaining how to maintain heavy equipment, including forklifts, bulldozers, bucket excavators and front-end loaders. He saw students moving piles of snow and sand with a skid-steer loader.
For a kid who loves pickup trucks and four-wheeling and snowmobiling, it seemed like heaven.
“I really wanted to be doing that,” Pierce said. “They said if I got my grades up, I could go there.”
So Pierce set his sights on improving his grades. He made sure he got his homework done. He started using study halls for studying rather than talking with friends or fooling around.
By junior year, his grades were good enough to enroll in the heavy equipment operation program at the vocational center – “the Voc,” for short. He started taking courses there every afternoon, following his regular classes at Greely High. He started making the honor roll. And he loved it.
“Every day I went to the Voc, I was excited to be there,” Pierce said. “I was happy to be doing what I enjoy and what I want to do in the future.”
During his senior year, Pierce worked on an independent study project overseen by Mark Bay, coordinator of the alternative pathways program at Greely High. Pierce learned about personal and business finances through the lens of his passion for trucks. He researched everything related to buying a truck for a business, from selecting the best vehicle to financing it through a credit union. He learned about credit scores, interest rates and loan applications. He even met with truck sales people.
“Mr. Bay supported me the whole way and kept me focused,” Pierce said. “He was always asking me what I wanted to learn about. Further down the road, when I want to buy a truck, I’ll know what to do.”
Pierce also had a weekly internship at CMP Constructors in Freeport, where he helped the company’s master mechanics repair and maintain heavy equipment. And for his senior project, he restored a 1987 Chevrolet pickup that wowed school officials when he presented it last month.
Pierce’s future plans include working with his father, Robert, at R.A. Pierce Excavating in North Yarmouth.
“Someday I’d like to run the business myself,” he said.
– By Kelley Bouchard
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Maryam Abdullah, Portland High School
Portland High's Maryam Abdullah came to the U.S. from Iraq when she was 12. She blossomed in Portland schools, where she saw other immigrant students succeeding and knew that she could, too. "I felt like nothing was impossible," she says. Gregory Rec/Staff PhotographerAs a little girl growing up in Baghdad, Maryam Abdullah marveled at the sight of airplanes soaring across the sky.
She never imagined that she would one day fly to a new home in the United States or that she could ever hope to get a job at NASA.
Abdullah was 8 years old when her father, Habiq, was killed during the Iraq war, an event that sent her life into an understandable tailspin.
“He used to help me study. He always told me education was important,” Abdullah said. “But after he died, we had to move a lot, and I couldn’t keep up in school. Eventually I dropped out.”
Abdullah came to the United States when she was 12 years old, first settling in Georgia. “Yes” and “no” were the only English words she knew. She tried to fit in at school, but she felt “invisible.”
Her mother, Salwa Alnadiry, had several siblings living in Portland, so they moved here when Abdullah was in eighth grade. She started attending King Middle School, where she blossomed in classes for students who were learning to speak English. She saw other students from immigrant families were succeeding and knew that she could, too.
“It changed a lot of what I thought,” Abdullah said. “I felt like nothing was impossible.”
She continued taking classes for English language learners at Portland High School but quickly advanced. By her senior year, she was taking three Advanced Placement courses. She became a member and leader of several groups that promote civil rights and global understanding, and she developed into a talented writer, artist and photographer.
Abdullah has a part-time job and is working on a graphic novel based on her life. It’s about a girl who moves to a new country and must adapt to a new culture and make good decisions for her future while maintaining respect for home, faith and family.
“It’s about what a Muslim girl can do,” Abdullah said. She credits her mother with being supportive and understanding and not holding her back from achieving her dreams.
Abdullah has a full scholarship to attend the University of Southern Maine, where she plans to study mechanical and electrical engineering.
“I’ve always wanted to build things to help people,” she said. “I want to work for NASA.”
Because nothing is impossible.
– By Kelley Bouchard
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Heritier ‘Fred’ Itangishaka and Everine Nzaninka, Westbrook High School
Westbrook High graduates Heritier "Fred" Itangishaka and Everine Nzaninka, siblings by adoption, each earned scholarships to local schools where they plan to study science and medicine. Carl D. Walsh/Staff PhotographerHeritier “Fred” Itangishaka and Everine Nzaninka don’t know exactly what happened to their parents.
Brother and sister by adoption, each was about 8 years old when their birth parents were killed in 2006, a tragic result of civil strife that has plagued what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo for more than a century. Soon thereafter, they found themselves in an orphanage in Uvira, the city where they grew up. For Itangishaka and Nzaninka, who had separate birth parents, it was as if their mothers and fathers vanished from their lives.
“They told us that our parents died, but we didn’t see them,” Nzaninka said. “For a kid, it was a confusing time.”
Fast-forward a decade, through dark and uncertain periods rife with fear, loneliness and separation, including nine months living on their own as refugees in Kenya. Now, less than two years after they came to the United States, both teens are planning hopeful futures in the medical field following their graduation from Westbrook High School with high honors.
They credit their survival and recent success to their adoptive mother, Damari Nabarebera, a former primary school teacher who plucked Itangishaka and Nzaninka from the orphanage. Nabarebera had been nursing a vacancy in her heart since 1994, when her husband, a businessman, and four of their seven children were killed while the family was visiting neighboring Rwanda.
“She wanted to help children who lost so much,” Nzaninka explained.
Nabarebera took in Itangishaka and Nzaninka, along with two younger children who also lost their parents to violence against the Tutsi ethnic group. By 2008 she had adopted all four. In 2011, faced with the opportunity to emigrate to the United States, Nabarebera left her adopted children behind with family members and came to Maine.
“It was hard to deal with all that painful stuff, but you learn to cope,” Itangishaka said.
As violence raged around them and some of their neighbors were killed, the children eventually fled to the relative safety of a refugee camp in Kenya, where they waited for an opportunity to join Nabarebera in Maine. Finally, in September 2014, the family was reunited in Westbrook.
“We were excited to see her but kind of nervous, too,” Nzaninka said.
Itangishaka and Nzaninka had to adapt to a lot pretty quickly because everything is different here, from the American lifestyle to Maine’s evergreen landscape. But they’ve settled in and made friends and now work part-time jobs at local fast-food restaurants.
And they’ve excelled at Westbrook High, where each received an honor’s medal for having a high grade point average. Itangishaka received a president’s scholarship to attend the University of Southern Maine and Nzaninka has a four-year tuition scholarship to attend Saint Joseph’s College in Standish. Both plan to study science and work toward careers in medicine.
They are grateful for the opportunities they have in the United States and hope to build successful lives here, they said, but they also would like to help people in their home country.
“I would go back and build a hospital and an orphanage,” Nzaninka said. “I want to help all people.”
– By Kelley Bouchard
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Michael Lombardi, Traip Academy
Traip Academy's Michael Lombardi is delaying the start of his college career at Bates for a yearlong immersive program in Aomori, Japan. Derek Davis/Staff PhotographerWhen Michael Lombardi graduates from Traip Academy in Kittery on Friday, it won’t be the end of his high school education.
Lombardi has been accepted to Bates College, but he’s delaying the start of his college career for one year so he can attend another year of high school in Aomori, Japan, a prefecture that has a sister-state relationship with Maine.
Lombardi developed an interest in Japan when he was a sixth-grader at Shapleigh Middle School. A contingent of students and officials from the Tobu-Kamikita Schools in Oirase and Rokunohe, Aomori, came to visit the middle school and Lombardi struck up a friendship with one of the boys.
“I had a good time talking with him and after he left, we continued communicating,” Lombardi said.
The summer after eighth grade, Lombardi traveled to Aomori with a group from the middle school and stayed with his Japanese friend’s family.
“It was an eye-opening experience, where I found out the whole world isn’t just Maine,” Lombardi said. “On the plane trip back, I was sitting next to a man from China who spoke Chinese, Japanese and was fluent in English. It made me realize that some people spend their whole lives immersing themselves in other cultures and languages just so they can bridge the gaps between people.”
When Lombardi started high school, he began studying Japanese online and has become conversational, enough so that he acts as a translator and guide whenever students visit from Aomori and he volunteers as an instructor for the Japan Club at the middle school.
Described as one of the friendliest students at Traip, Lombardi is an Eagle Scout who played alto saxophone in the academy’s bands and was a member of the academy’s drama club, making the all-cast list at the regional drama festival this spring. He also plays guitar in the youth band that he started at the Church at Spruce Creek and he works at Terra Cotta Pasta Co., a part-time job that turns full time each summer.
Lombardi held community fundraisers, assisted by the Kittery Lions Club, that raised $4,000 to help pay for his year abroad. He’s looking forward to meeting new people, honing his Japanese language skills and learning more about Japanese culture. He plans to study Japanese and economics in college, but he also hopes his experience encourages other Kittery kids to look far beyond Maine’s borders.
“I want to show students there are opportunities out there,” he said. “You just have to work for them.”
– By Kelley Bouchard
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Molly Merrifield, Gorham High School
Gorham High School graduate Molly Merrifield holds a piglet at Merrifield Farm in Gorham. "I've kind of built a name for myself," she says, "and people know that I raise quality pigs." Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff PhotographerWhile some high school graduates struggle to choose a career, Molly Merrifield already has a few, and she’s been working at them for a while.
The Gorham High School graduate grew up on Merrifield Farm, a 25-acre spread in North Gorham, where she helped her parents, Lyle and Jo-Ann, produce maple syrup and make many delicious things with it.
When Merrifield was in seventh grade, she made a trip that winter to the renowned Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg. She ventured into the noisy, crowded arena of the livestock auction and placed the winning bid on a bred Duroc sow.
She bought the burgundy brown pig, named Powerwheels for good reason, with $500 she had saved from raising and showing other pigs. She showed the sow’s seven piglets that September at the Cumberland Fair. They won several ribbons, and she sold them all.
“That was the spark of breeding my own,” Merrifield said. “I’ve kind of built a name for myself, and people know that I raise quality pigs.”
She continued to raise pigs and working steers, showing at five fairs each year, and became the president of two 4-H clubs, an organization she joined when she was 3 years old. She was selected to go to the weeklong 4-H Citizenship Washington Focus last summer in Washington, D.C. And she has been part of the 4-H Teens as Teachers program, an experience she especially enjoyed.
“I like working with little kids and giving them someone to look up to,” she said. “I also like showing them little tricks to help them show their animals well, like the best way to present animals and how to talk to judges and answer questions.”
Merrifield completed a two-week senior internship project at Custom Cuts & Nails in Standish, where she got a taste of her other career interest. She plans to study hairstyling at Spa Tech Institute in Westbrook in the fall.
She played varsity basketball all four years at Gorham High, and was elected captain her senior year, when the team won the state championship. She graduated with high honors, overcoming the challenges of dyslexia.
Through it all, she worked as a waitress at Gilbert’s Chowder House in Windham, a job she plans to keep while she learns hairstyling and beyond. She also hopes to become a 4-H judge next year, after she ages out of the program. And she will probably always breed and raise pigs and steers.
She sees her animals as intelligent, sensitive beings that are fun to work with and bring joy into her life. Sometimes they’re better than humans.
“The bond between owner and animals is hard to explain,” Merrifield said. “Being around them never gets old.”
– By Kelley Bouchard
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Stanzin Angmo, North Yarmouth Academy
Stanzin Angmo, an international student at North Yarmouth Academy, plans to study women's health at Bennington College in Vermont this fall. "I have a lot more to learn here," she says, to share with her hometown in northern India. Gabe Souza/Staff PhotographerStanzin Angmo comes from a place that claims the distinction of having several of the highest motorable roads in the world.
An international student at North Yarmouth Academy in Yarmouth, Angmo grew up in the small village of Stok in Ladakh, a remote region of northern India on the Tibetan Plateau in the Himalayas. Her father is retired from the Indian army. Her mother is a homemaker whose daily tasks include hauling water from a village pump.
Angmo was a top student at the Siddhartha School in Stok, which is sponsored by the Portland-based Siddhartha School Project. When she was in 10th grade, the school’s founder, Khen Rinpoche Lobzang Tsetan, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, offered Angmo a scholarship to finish high school in the United States.
“It was a very, very rare opportunity, and I said yes,” Angmo recalled. “I always loved English and my English teachers.”
Angmo credits a network of people with helping her to succeed here. She lives on Cousins Island with the family of Joanna See, a tutor at the academy, and she meets regularly with Freda Bernotavicz of Topsham, who has sponsored Angmo’s education since first grade.
“The first few months were very hard because I was a little homesick and I was shy,” Angmo said. But soon she made friends and got involved in activities, including several sports she played for the first time.
Last summer Angmo completed a monthlong internship at a New Jersey hospital with a fellow Siddhartha student, Tsewang Chuskit, who attended the Rockland County Day School in New York. They learned about women’s health issues and observed heart surgery and an ultrasound procedure.
Next, Angmo and Chuskit attended a summer science and engineering program for high school girls at Smith College in Massachusetts, where they took courses taught by experts in the field of young women’s health and wellness.
Then they went home to Ladakh, and traveled the Taglang La mountain pass, to share what they learned in presentations to adolescent girls and their mothers at several village schools. Much of it was basic information about puberty, menstruation, sexual health, hygiene and relationships that wasn’t readily discussed in their community.
“All of it was so new to us,” Angmo said. “Mothers don’t talk to their daughters about these things. It was nice to see them learning. I felt really happy to be able to remove taboos around women’s health issues and any doubts they have about their bodies.”
Angmo plans to study women’s health at Bennington College in Vermont.
“I want to help women in my hometown,” she said. “I have a lot more to learn here and a lot more to do there.”
– By Kelley Bouchard
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Darren Thiboutot, Cheverus High School
Darren Thiboutot, a graduate of Cheverus High School in Portland, has already seen some success performing in a blues band. He plans to study music education at the University of Maine at Augusta, where he received a scholarship. Derek Davis/Staff PhotographerDarren “Lil’ Bluesman” Thiboutot got a taste of the music business beyond Maine in January, when he performed at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, Tennessee.
Sponsored by the Maine Blues Society, Thiboutot was there as a noncompeting youth performer under age 21. Guitar in hand, he took the stage at Silky O’Sullivan’s on Beale Street alone, without the two older members of his Topsham-based band, Memphis Lightning.
Before an audience of about 200 people, he played and sang a few of his originals, including “Trouble” and “Go Away,” and a few classics, including “Dust My Broom,” which was recorded first by Robert Johnson and later by Elmore James.
“It was surreal,” recalled Thiboutot, a Cheverus High School graduate. “It was a little frightening because I was used to playing with a band. But it was fun and it was great exposure, and afterward I had a great feeling of accomplishment.”
In the audience was his dad and fellow band member, Darren “Big Red” Thiboutot, a drummer who backed the great blues guitarist Eddie Kirkland in the 1990s. The bass guitarist in Memphis Lightning is Rick “Slow Driver” McLennan, another accomplished Maine musician.
Memphis Lightning’s first album, “Trouble,” is due out this summer. A video of the band performing ” ’67 Cadillac,” with music and lyrics by Thiboutot, is available on youtube.com and on the band’s Facebook page. The band is set to perform at the Maine Blues Festival in Naples next weekend and the North Atlantic Blues Festival in Rockland July 16-17.
Now 18, Thiboutot has come a long way in a decade.
“I got my first guitar when I was 8, but I didn’t really get into it until I was 10,” Thiboutot said. “My first paying gig was about 12 at Bentley’s Saloon in Arundel. It was with my dad. I was pretty much hooked then.”
Thiboutot’s father gave him his first guitar and showed him how to play. He also took lessons from prominent Maine guitarists Mike Hayward and Scott Hughes, and he picked up a few things from Eddie Kirkland, too. Now, he teaches himself.
“You see other bands and you always learn something new,” Thiboutot said. “And you learn a lot just by doing it.”
Playing in pubs and at festivals at such a young age, Thiboutot got some early life lessons, but his father always watched over him.
“I had to mature sooner and act older,” he said. “Being in a band kept me in line, in a way. Knowing I had a show coming up, I had to have all my homework caught up.”
Thiboutot, who played in the jazz combo at Cheverus, said he’s grateful for his family’s unflagging encouragement, including his mom, Deborah. He plans to study music education at the University of Maine at Augusta, where he received a president’s scholarship for half tuition. And he’ll keep on playing the blues.
“I’ve always loved the blues,” he said. “You can encompass several styles when you play the blues, including rock, country and roots music. And I like the rawness and the emotion in the blues. There’s always something more to it than the eye can see.”
– By Kelley Bouchard
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Henry Jones, Casco Bay High School
Casco Bay High School's Henry Jones admits: "I'm a weird dude. ... and I'm glad about that." Derek Davis/Staff PhotographerHenry Jones relishes his weirdness. His upbringing in a large, loving, diverse family is a major reason he enjoys solving problems for others, especially when it involves computers.
And it explains why he was considered one of the friendliest and most helpful students at Casco Bay High School in Portland.
“I’m a weird dude,” Jones said. “I’m a big black guy who loves computers and sails and has two white moms. I have no shame about myself or my family. I have a pretty weird perspective, and I’m glad about that.”
Jones is the adopted son of Gwyneth Jones and Gretchen Berg, both performance artists and educators. He discovered that he had a gift for computer coding through the robotics team at Portland High School.
“When I do that, I can break down anything I see into a few small problems and then fix the entire problem,” he said.
One of his happiest days was on the floor of the 2014 VEX Robotics World Championship in Anaheim, California. Surrounded by 75,000 other competitors, he wrote and rewrote code to control the team’s robot. They didn’t win, but it was awesome.
“It felt really amazing to get to that level the first year of the team,” Jones said. “It validated what I could accomplish with hard work unbounded by the limits of others.”
Jones transferred to Casco Bay High as a sophomore. In 2014, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, he traveled with the junior class to Red Hook, New York, to document effects of climate change. He wrote about the experience for Education Week magazine.
“Although disaster can level cities, you don’t have to let it defeat you,” Jones wrote. “I realized that, supported by my community, I have the power to lift myself from adversity.”
Jones was among the first Portland graduates to earn a diploma endorsement for excellence in science, technology, engineering and math. He helped faculty with computer challenges and designed a website (cascobayhub.com) to showcase Junior Journey research projects.
“Everything I’ve accomplished is because I’ve given back,” Jones said.
In his spare time, Jones was captain of the high school’s sailing team and a host of the Blunt Youth Radio program at WMPG-FM, and he’s a line cook at Local 188 Restaurant & Lounge.
Jones plans to study computer science at Union College in Schenectady, New York, but he’s taking a year off for a few adventures abroad. He’ll spend a month in Switzerland working at a vineyard, a couple of weeks visiting Paris and a Carpe Diem semester in Cuba next spring.
Wherever he winds up, his long-term goal is pretty simple:
“I want to find a place where I’m happy to wake up every morning and do what I like to do.”
– By Kelley Bouchard
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Gage Anderson, Berwick Academy
Berwick Academy graduate Gage Anderson has been studying cancer treatment and prevention throughout high school, including nanotechnology, genetic mutations and stints shadowing oncologists and radiologists. Gregory Rec/Staff PhotographerCancer terrifies most people. For Gage Anderson, it has been the driving focus of his independent studies since he was a freshman at Berwick Academy in South Berwick.
“It’s a scourge on the Western world and the second-biggest killer in the United States,” Anderson said, “and I find it absolutely fascinating.”
As a freshman, Gage elected to participate in an extracurricular program, “Innovation Pursuit,” that was designed to build on his longstanding personal interest in science and engineering. The springboard for his studies was “Physics of the Future,” a 2011 book that he read as a seventh-grader.
Written by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, the book describes a future where computers constantly scan us for health problems and diseases such as cancer are battled by reprogramming genes through biomedical engineering and nanotechnology.
“I read that and thought, ‘I don’t believe it, but that’s absolutely fantastic,’ ” Anderson recalled.
Throughout high school, Anderson studied everything he could about ongoing cancer research. In ninth grade, it was biomedical engineering. As a sophomore, it was cancer and nanotechnology. As a junior, he studied nutrition and lifestyle choices related to cancer prevention, and as a senior, he studied the latest research on genetic mutations.
“I find it fascinating to find the exact set of circumstances that led to a mutation,” Anderson said. Researchers would then target the mutation with preventive vaccines, immunotherapy or other countermeasures.
He spent time at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, New Hampshire, where he shadowed oncologists and radiologists and interviewed cancer patients and research scientists. He also works part time for his family’s excavation and landscaping company in York.
Anderson was accepted early decision to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he plans to study chemical and biomedical engineering. Ultimately, he’d like to do intensive research in targeted cancer therapy.
Anderson is inspired by his grandmother, who survived breast cancer and now battles ovarian cancer. And he’s motivated by the pure challenge of figuring out one of the most fearsome diseases.
“There is no single cure for cancer,” he said. “There are millions of them. Each mutation is different, so you’re never going to cure them all at once. We’ll have to cure each one. I want to be a part of that.”
– By Kelley Bouchard
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