Layla Ismail

Layla Ismail is a rising senior at Cleveland STEM High School in Beacon Hill, Seattle. She has had extensive STEM education in classes like Applied Molecular Biology, Biomedical Science, 2 AP Comp. Sci. courses, and more for the past three years. Her studies have inspired her to someday pursue a career in research and medical practice as an MD-PhD. Layla has a lot of passion for community work, research, and medicine. She plans to continue working in mutual aid and participating in medical research projects.

Layla likes to write poetry, play with her kitten Chai, and snowboard in her free time. Regarding extracurricular activities, Layla is President of her school's National Honors Society, Debate team, and Founder of a mutual aid collective called Beauty in Our Community (BiOC). Through BiOC, she has organized several mutual aid events, protests, actions, and conversations between youth and the Seattle Public Schools superintendent board. Layla was also a two-year intern for the Black Brilliance Research project and the Seattle Community Network, focused on building cellular data towers in Black and Brown neighborhoods and teaching kids of color how to code.

At ISB, Layla worked with her partner Suwayda, using machine learning to analyze large cancer datasets, developing an advanced module in R that analyzes the presence of stem cell markers in the GBM tumor immune microenvironment after drug treatment. They also worked with the ST-Analytics team at ISB, which looks at the efficacy of sequential immunotherapies on melanoma tumors. She and Suwayda interviewed ISB, Yale, UCLA, and Johns Hopkins researchers and gained a better understanding of how interdisciplinary multi-institution-spanning research projects work.

Layla would like to thank everyone on the SEE team at ISB and her fellow interns for the neverending laughs and for always being down to explore and try new things with her.