(gentle music) - My name is Aarthi Vijayakumar and I will be a medical doctor and scientist in the future.

Currently, I'm a sophomore in college.

I think that I've always loved biology and science because I find why things happen really interesting.

I find myself questioning why a lot.

One of the things that I like to do for fun is perform and practice Indian classical dance and I have for 14 or 15 years now, so it's a really big part of my life and my identity and it always has been.

My parents are both immigrants from India and my mom actually grew up dancing, as well, so that's a really great connection that I have with her.

I love that dance is really integrated into my culture, my South Asian heritage and my religion.

My dance teacher is definitely one of my biggest role models.

She studied chemical engineering, so that's been really inspirational for me.

But just as much as she's taught me about dance, she's taught me about life, about always putting forward your best, always being prepared, but also letting life take you where it takes you.

And that's just like been really a calming force and a supportive force in my life for a really long time now.

(lively music) Genes in Space is a competition for middle school and high school students where you can design an experiment about life science and biology.

A lot of times these effect astronauts and the human body to put up into space on the International Space Station.

So it's a really cool way to take a biology experiment or something you might be interested in studying on Earth and actually get to see it fly in space.

I had been interested in biology for a while and I'd actually even done some research in biology before Genes in Space, but I never knew that space biology was this whole separate field.

It's so connected to the biology that we do here on Earth, but at the same time it's so completely different.

And so being a part of Genes in Space really opened my eyes to how powerful all the same tools that we use on Earth are in space and how much we can learn from space flight, from astronauts, that they do all of these experiments up on the ISS every day.

I just had no idea that there was so much research being done all the time, especially biology research.

My junior year of high school, me and three of my friends entered the competition and then one day in mid-May we actually got a call saying that we were selected as finalists and that we would get to go to the ISS R&D conference in July.

And that was so exciting.

The focus of our experiment was protecting astronaut health in space.

So one thing that we learned a lot about is that astronauts have an increased risk of cancer, even after they come back from the International Space Station.

One of the biggest tools that we used and one of the most important ones was a gene editing tool called CRISPR-Cas9.

And what CRISPR basically does is it acts as a pair of scissors for DNA and it can allow us to make a cut in the DNA at any site that we choose.

So if scientists know the specific sequence of a piece of DNA and they're interested in studying it, they can make a cut with CRISPR at that site.

A few years back, even entering something like Genes in Space where I just had no idea where space biology was would've been kind of intimidating and I would've really doubted myself.

And I think that I've come a long way in terms of that.

Just by working really hard at things that I love, I've realized that you don't need to do things because other people are doing them and that's been a really big revelation and really influential in my life.

So I'm proud of the fact that I've come to that point.

Continuing to share experiences with young girls and women is really important to show them that they can do it too, that they can pursue whatever they want to and just run with it.

I think I've been wanting to be a doctor for most of my life now, but really just curious about science, especially.

I used to read a lot of books about space and the human body and just over and over again and that's just kind of evolved into the love I have for science today and I definitely just wanna pursue that for a long time.

I think medicine specifically has been really important to me for a long time because I would love to help people in any way I can, but not only treat people, but find solutions for others' problems and advocate for healthcare where people aren't necessarily able to do it themselves.

(lively music)