From my understanding she's a summer student at the Yat Li lab at UCSC.[1] This concept is not newly developed by this young student[2][3], it seems that she's

From my understanding she's a summer student at the Yat Li lab at UCSC.[1] This concept is not newly developed by this young student[2][3], it seems that she's just a summer student who used the labs work to submit to the Intel competition, this is actually a very common practice for high school students. As usual the media overstated her role, the work was not done in the 2.5 months she has off for the summer solely by her. That's not to say she might not be bright, but it's not her genius that developed this concept, although she may have contributed. In fact this work was first submitted for publication in 2010[3], long before she joined the lab in 2012[4][5]. [1]http://www.usc.edu/CSSF//History/2013/Projects/S0912.pdf http://www.usc.edu/CSSF//History/2013/Projects/S0912.pdf [credit: gizmo686] [2]http://research.pbsci.ucsc.edu/chemistry/li/publications/2012_NanoLett_12_1690-1696.pdf http://research.pbsci.ucsc.edu/chemistry/li/publications/201... [3]http://research.pbsci.ucsc.edu/chemistry/li/publications/2011_NanoLett_11_3026-3033.pdf http://research.pbsci.ucsc.edu/chemistry/li/publications/201... [4]https://sites.google.com/site/yatliucsc/people https://sites.google.com/site/yatliucsc/people [5]http://www.ucolick.org/~raja/hs/LIST2011.txt http://www.ucolick.org/~raja/hs/LIST2011.txt Edit: Added reference showing she was not part of the Li lab in 2011. [5]