Sarah Reisman, 36
Caltech | Organic Chemistry
Graduate school: Yale
Organic chemistry haunts most pre-med students, but not Sarah Reisman. The two-semester class was so invigorating that she abandoned her pre-med major to pursue chemistry.
“Organic chem presented me with this idea that we could do things that are new,” says Reisman, who heads a lab at Caltech. “The idea that I could design a brand new way to make a molecule, there was this real creative component,” she says.