Anooshree Sengupta (12) talks about research exactly the way you’d expect someone who truly loves science to speak. She’s a self-proclaimed “huge math nerd.” She reminisces about attempting to explain her fascination with Punnett squares to her economics-major mother. To her, physics isn’t just a class — it’s like “X-ray vision for the world.”

So it came as no surprise to her family and friends when she took up research. However, she chose her first research project topic in eighth grade not as a result of a class she took or a book she read, but rather because of a pair of sweaty volleyball socks.

“In middle school, I had this pair of socks from volleyball. My mom gave them to me and told me, ‘These socks have nanoparticles so they should not smell,'” Anooshree said. “I didn’t believe that, though, so my eighth grade science fair project was about nanoparticles and how they interact with bacteria.”

Doing this project was a spontaneous, impulsive decision, one that might have seemed out of character for someone as grounded, organized and academically driven as Anooshree. But the truth is that Anooshree embraces adventure, both in her academics and her daily life.

“Something that people don’t really know is that I’m pretty adventurous. I like to go out and do things,” Anooshree said. “And if it sucks, whatever, and I’ll just do something else next time, but if I like it, then I’ll just go after it.”

And although Anooshree is a member of WiSTEM and consciously promotes female STEM involvement, advocacy wasn’t on her mind when she first became involved in science. Rather, science was another activity to test the waters in and try out.

“Ironically enough, my entire family is descended from English professors. My dad was kind of the rebel when he went into science, so I’ve never seen science as something I was forced into or that I was ever out of place in,” Anooshree said. “It was just something I was interested in, and my mom has so much confidence in whatever she does — like I was so shy, but my mom said, ‘You just have to get over it.'”

In fact, Anooshree credits her parents for inspiring her to follow her passions — though in very different ways. Anooshree’s dad, for instance, pushed her to study subjects that she truly found fascinating.

“My dad has always been more of an academic person. He’s always been this person who would buy me astronomy books and made me memorize the planets when I was little,” Anooshree said. “He dragged me out when the sky was clear, and he would say, ‘This is this constellation, this is that constellation’. He fueled my curiosity, because he showed me that you should always care about what you’re learning about, whether it’s English or whatever.”

On the other side of the spectrum, Anooshree’s mother, who she describes as “a New York socialite, if she had been born into the right family at the right time,” infused Anooshree’s life with spontaneity.

“My mom takes me out, we go on a lot of little adventures, and at any random time, she’ll say, ‘Get in the car and get ready,’ without me even knowing where we’re going, and we’ll end up somewhere like Carmel-by-the-Sea or at a party. Like, I got her into Ed Sheeran and then she went to an Ed Sheeran concert without me,” Anooshree said, laughing. “But it’s just given me this sense of being willing to explore and try new things.”

Throughout her life, Anooshree has actively sought out ways to explore, and she’s also made sure to leave behind the things that stifle her creativity. Despite having been on a competitive robotics team for several years, Anooshree decided to quit once she felt that she was just going through the motions.

“[Our team would] try to put together a really creatively designed robot that would take in new concepts, whether it was coding or hardware, and then it got to the point where judges would look at the creative design and say, ‘oh, that’s cool,’ but we weren’t scoring the highest,” Anooshree said. “And eventually, once you get to the world championships, everyone’s robot looks the same. You’re competing against a robot just like yours.”

Although robotics made up an integral part of her identity for several years, Anooshree has had no trouble filling up her schedule with activities that she truly loves, often helping others while embracing her roots. For every activity that she jumps into, Anooshree has a personal story or connection, whether it’s teaching robotics to younger kids or doing her own research.

“A lot of my science research is not really driven by what I’m interested in academically, but how I can help the people I love,” Anooshree said. “My mom has an autoimmune disease and it’s not super serious but it’s driven my research in the immune system. My grandpa, before he passed away, had a really hard time walking around because he had vision problems, so my friend and I did a guide robot for the blind. That’s the one unifying thing behind it all.”

As connected as Anooshree is to her roots, both within her family and her community, she takes the next chapter of her life as another opportunity to explore.

“A lot of people stay [in the Bay Area], and then it’s just this concentration of people who think the same,” Anooshree said. “And meeting people who don’t think the same is always fascinating, even if you disagree with them.”