Elisa is a rising senior at Issaquah High School in the class of 2020. She has been playing first violin in the school district audition orchestra, Evergreen Philharmonic, since her freshman year and is now moving on to perform with the Issaquah Chamber Strings. For the last two years, she has been heavily involved in tutoring and mentoring in her school district. She is the founder of Enbrighten, a tutoring club in which high schoolers tutor a group of 30 middle schoolers once a week. Elisa also frequently mentors violin, viola, and cello in her role as Vice-President of an instrument practice club called Instrumentors. She also spends afternoons at a local elementary school mentoring third-graders to significantly improve their math, reading, writing, and teamwork skills. In her free time, she is a member of the Washington Karate Association, with which she has now become a double gold medalist in the International Shitoryu Foundation Competition. She also enjoys hiking, flying trapeze, and anything avocado-related.
Elisa’s love for STEM began at a very young age in Math Olympiad in elementary school, and since then she has been heavily involved in AP science and math classes and tutoring/mentoring students in material ranging from 2nd through 8th grade. STEM-based opportunities have allowed her to develop her creative, analytical, and problem-solving skills, which were all helpful traits in her internship at ISB where she was challenged to optimize a previously made protocol for more accurate results. She hopes to continue being involved in research and will be majoring in a biology-related field in college.
Contact: elisagehrke@gmail.com