When Indrani Das needed motivation, she left the lab. The 2017 winner of the Regeneron Science Talent Search -- one of the United States' most prestigious science and math competitions -- enrolled in her local ambulance corps as an emergency medical technician. She needed to be close to people: the kind of lives she one day hopes to improve.
"It was this thought that there could be a person at the end of this experiment ... that drove me to continue," she said. Answering 911 calls helped with that.