Maharishi School alumna receives prestigious scholarship

FAIRFIELD — Fairfield resident Shristi Sharma has earned one of the most prestigious collegiate scholarships in the country.

Sharma, a 2021 graduate of Maharishi School, is one of only 30 people from around the world this year to receive a Robertson Scholarship, a merit-based scholarship that provides recipients a full-ride at the University of North Carolina and Duke University. Sharma is the first person from Iowa to receive this honor.

Robertson Scholars receive support to pursue their research interests, and Sharma already has a project she’s anxious to work on. Sharma was a highly decorated presenter in science fairs, and was named the overall winner of the State Science and Technology Fair of Iowa her junior year of high school.

Her project involved developing a smartwatch app that could predict Alzheimer’s disease. Sharma said knowing 10-15 years in advance whether a person is at risk of Alzheimer’s would allow them to get treatments to delay its onset.

Sharma said the next step in her research will be to test the app through clinical trials with human subjects.

“This is beyond an individual project now,” Sharma said. “I need a team of bio-statisticians and computer programmers. UNC and Duke are both research universities, so I hope to develop this project in college.”

Dual student

Sharma left Fairfield for North Carolina on Saturday for a camping trip with other Robertson scholars. She will live on campus at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill but will have full access to all of Duke University’s courses and facilities (just 10 miles away in Durham) because she is a dual UNC-Duke student, as are all Robertson scholars. One requirement of her scholarship is that she spend at least one semester at the “other” campus, which means she will move to Durham for the spring semester, right in the middle of basketball season.

“Both schools have a very big sports culture,” she said.

The Robertson Scholarship Leadership Program can be thought of as another level above a collegiate honors program, which Sharma also will be in. It is named after its benefactors Julian H. Robertson Jr. and his late wife, Josie. The family donated $24 million to create the program to develop young leaders, with the first class graduating in 2005.

The leadership program extends into the summers, too, with each summer a different theme. For instance, Sharma said her first summer will be spent doing public service at a city in North Carolina, the second exploring a personal interest like working in another country, and the third transitioning into the workforce through an internship, which the program will pay for.

Sharma’s arrival at UNC this past week was the first time she stepped foot in North Carolina. She said it will be tough being so far from her family and her hometown.

“I’ve been here ever since I was 5,” she said.

Early life

Sharma was born near Kolkata (previously Calcutta) in India, the eldest daughter of Asha and Suresh Sharma. She lived in a house with members of her dad’s family, about nine or 10 people in all. She was exposed to many languages in her youth. Her parents’ native language is Marwari, spoken in the state of Rajasthan, but since the family was living in the state of West Bengal, they also learned Bengali.

At home, the Sharma family speaks exclusively Hindi, a practice they continued when they moved from India to Fairfield in 2008 when Sharma was 5 and her younger sister Antariksha was less than a year old. Sharma said her parents have stressed the importance of learning Hindi because they want their daughters to be able to speak with the rest of the family back in India.

During her tenure as a student at Maharishi School in Fairfield, Sharma became a leader in multiple clubs. She was captain of the robotics team, the rocketry team, and Student Council president.

As a freshman in high school, she founded the Fairfield chapter of “Girls Who Code,” an organization that teaches girls the joys of computer programming. She joined the youth-arm of Rotary, called Interact, in seventh grade and became one of its leaders, too. She especially loved volunteering at the Fairfield library’s storybook-themed event “When the Lights Go Out” on Halloween. She is proud of the group’s charitable work, such as sponsoring a girl from Kenya to study at an agriculture school.

“It was like adopting a sister from halfway across the world,” Sharma said.

Computer science

Sharma said her favorite academic discipline is computer science, which she has spent considerable time studying outside school. She took her first class on computer programming at age 10 when her father found an online course from the University of Michigan that taught the programming language Python. Just a fourth-grader at the time, Sharma was completing college-level assignments and getting feedback from her peers in the field.

The young programmer went on to take another computer science course, this time from Harvard University, and got a “nanodegree” from Udacity, an industry-level certification.

Sharma’s interest in computer science carried over into her projects for the science fair. Her first project, in eighth grade, was on how easily a password can be hacked. She received a prize for it at the Eastern Iowa Science and Engineering Fair, and was hooked on the competition. She followed that project with one on “phishing,” or scam emails. She got five Fairfield companies to agree to let her send scam emails to their staff to test whether they could recognize them as fraudulent. Sharma said a few I.T. employees at these companies didn’t like what she was doing because she was proving that their internet security systems could be bypassed.

As a sophomore, Sharma unveiled another cutting-edge project for the science fair. She wrote an algorithm that could search Twitter looking for people who might commit a school shooting based on their tweets. She received numerous awards at the Eastern Iowa science fair, and looked to be sailing toward another prize at state. One judge at state told her she was only the second competitor the judge had given a “100” to in her 20 years of judging.

Sadly, Sharma received crushing news at the state contest when organizers told her she was disqualified because she had not obtained informed consent from the Twitter users whose tweets her algorithm searched. Sharma said she obtained consent from Twitter to run the algorithm, but contest rules required her to get consent from each user, an impossible task given the number of Twitter users involved.

Sharma did not let that setback get her down, and thought of a new topic for her junior year, the one she wants to pursue as a research project in college. A family friend had recently died from Alzheimer’s disease, and that got Sharma thinking about ways to mitigate Alzheimer’s through technology. One day while reading a magazine, she saw an article about Alzheimer’s on one page and an advertisement for a Fitbit smartwatch on the next page.

“Something clicked in my brain and I said, ‘What if you could predict Alzheimer’s with your smartwatch?’” Sharma said.

Sharma created a prototype app on her mom’s smartwatch that relied on health information the watch gathered from its wearer to predict getting Alzheimer’s 10-15 years later.

“Though there’s no cure for Alzheimer’s, knowing 15 years beforehand can allow you to get treatments to delay the onset of the disease for a really long time,” she said.

Sharma’s project won the top award at the state science fair and was nominated to compete in the international fair. For her final year of high school, Sharma continued with her smartwatch app prototype. She updated her app with new data and ran computer simulations to test its accuracy. At state, her project earned first place in the computer science category.

Robertson scholar

While searching for merit-based scholarships last fall, Sharma’s father Suresh learned about the Robertson Scholarship at UNC and Duke. Recipients receive a full-ride, can take classes at either university and receive money to attend conferences or participate in internships. Robertson scholars even have their own bus that takes them back and forth between the two campuses.

The scholarship is highly selective with just 30 students receiving it each year, and the application for it is “intense,” Sharma said. She said the essays required for it were some of the hardest and most unusual she’s ever had to write. Sharma went through multiple rounds of interviews, some of which were “confrontational” where she had to think on her feet and respond to criticism.

When Sharma learned she would be one of the select few who had received the scholarship, she knew all of that hard work was worth it. Sharma chose the Robertson Scholarship over the Lester B. Pearson International Scholarship, which came with a free-ride to the University of Toronto.