Sarah Nyquist got her first introduction to biology during high school, when she took an online MIT course taught by genomics pioneer Eric Lander. Initially unsure what to expect, she quickly discovered biology to be her favorite subject. She began experimenting with anything she could find, beginning with an old PCR machine and some dining hall vegetables. Nyquist entered college as a biology major but soon gravitated toward the more hands-on style of the coursework in her computer science classes. Even as a computer science major and a two-time summer intern at Google, biology was never far from Nyquist’s mind. Her favorite class was taught by a computational biology professor: “It got me so excited to use computer science as a tool to interrogate biological questions,” she recalls.
