Incoming Undergrad Is Published in PRL

Amith Varambally of Vestavia Hills, Alabama, comes to Caltech as a first-year undergraduate student in fall 2023 already a co-author of a journal article related to his work as a high school intern at MIT in summer 2022. It is uncommon for undergraduates to publish in STEM journals. Still less common is to see a high school student appearing as a co-author in the pages of an esteemed physics journal. This is the rare achievement of incoming undergrad Amith Varambally. "I didn't know what to expect when I set foot in Boston last summer, and I certainly never expected to be a co-author in a Physical Review Letters paper," says Varambally. As a rising senior in high school, Varambally applied to the Research in Science and Engineering Program at Boston University and was placed in the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory at MIT under the direction of Jagadeesh Moodera, a senior research scientist. Varambally and his fellow intern Ourania Glezakou-Elbert, then a rising senior from Richland, Washington, promptly set to work learning about the physics behind superconducting diodes.