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Senior Sabrina Sharma is Gulliver Prep’s Silver Knight nominee in the area of Science. Not only does she love science, she also loves community service and has earned more than 1800 hours in volunteer service.
“I’ve always loved community service,” she says. “I was nurtured with the mentality of giving back. I don’t do it for it for the hours. I do things I love to do.”
Her parents immigrated to the U.S. before they met.
“The way they got here was through friends and family helping them,” she says. “They both did their residency at the University of Miami and they met there.”
Her mom is from Argentina and her Dad is from India.
In eighth grade, she had to do a project for school and she continued throughout high school. It’s called A Taste of Heaven.
“I would make desserts and I would sell it around Miami,” she says. “I really enjoy making cupcakes. I like to experiment with the different tips of the frosting bags. Cookies, but the cookies that are soft with stuff inside. I love red velvet cookies with white chocolate melted in it.”
The money she raises selling the baked goods is donated to the ALS Foundation.
“I always had an interest in Neurology because both my parents are neurologists,” she says. “I wanted to collaborate with the ALS project.”
Her grandfather passed due to Parkinson.
She did an internship with the foundation, shadowing doctors and nurses and doing a research project.
“They were looking at a genetic component to ALS,” she says. “We would get their genetic pictures of their chromosomes and compare them with time.”
The research project compared those genetic pictures. The participants checked in every two months.
She started volunteering at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in the pathology lab. The work she did there complimented what she was doing at school. Two summers ago, she was able to sign up for another shift so she signed up to volunteer in the operating room.
Unfortunately, COVID-19 has kept her from continuing to volunteer there.
“COVID hasn’t stopped my work with the ALS foundation,” she says. “I was able to see everything, how ALS affects people, how it affects the quality of life, how things are affected at a microscopic level.”
She also did a research project with other doctors at UM.
“It was published in the Translation Stroke Research Journal,” she says. “We looked into how the combination of nicotine and oral contraceptives affect the brain’s energy metabolism and how it increases the chance of ischemic stroke damage.”
Sharma applied Cornell, the University of California at Berkeley, and UCLA. Her college essay detailed why she loves baking so much.
“It definitely helps relieve my stress,” she says.
However, she plans to major in engineering, not baking.
“Right now, I’m looking into chemical engineering,” she says. “I’m into splitting atoms.
They’re trying to split water to create more effective energy sources. That fascinates me. That’s what I’m looking for the future.”
At Gulliver she’s the team manager for the robotics team. She organizes all the agendas and is one of the main members who design and build the robots. Sharma mentored children from Breakthrough Miami, as well as children at Sunset Elementary and Palmetto Elementary.
She is a member of the water polo team, a member of the National Honor Society, the National English Honor Society, the Science National Honor Society, Zeta Omicron, Mu Alpha Theta, Rho Kappa, and Cum Laude.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
