Shannon Jin

Shannon has worked towards this goal by furthering both her understanding of STEM and her understanding of her community and the problems it faces and the people it’s composed of. To expand her engineering knowledge, she worked in three different labs from three different institutions (University of Maryland, NIH, IBBR) during the course of her high school years, doing everything from coding databases to synthesizing inorganic fuel refiners to researching the application of phage enzymes, known as endolysins, as an antibacterial. To better serve and understand my community, Shannon represented Montgomery County students on the advisory council of the Student Member of the Board of Education for all four years of high school. In her final year of high school, after personally noticing a decline in female participation in STEM subjects (particularly computer science), Shannon founded Dream In Code, an organization which holds yearlong coding classes for middle school girls. Dream In Code will go on to its third year this fall.