Savannah Brown
Montgomery Blair High School
After going to a small school with other deaf students through eighth grade, Silver Spring’s Savannah Brown was up for a challenge. She wanted to take more rigorous classes, such as organic chemistry, and that meant transferring to a public school.
“It was really scary,” Savannah says, to go from a school of 100 students to being the only deaf student among over 3,200 at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring. Initially shy and feeling isolated, Savannah says she found friends with similar interests in science and joined several clubs. “Now I look at people and feel like we’re exactly the same—except I was not born with the ability to hear.”
Savannah, 17, who has been deaf since birth and whose parents are deaf, has sign language interpreters alongside her all day. She gives a short presentation at the beginning of classes each semester to dispel myths about deafness (her brain is the same as everyone else’s), share her tips on ways to communicate (texting or gesturing) and break the ice with humor (we do not bite; deaf people are cool).
“She was not afraid to address that subject in front of everyone in a funny and practical way. It was endearing,” says James Demma, Savannah’s Advanced Placement biology teacher. He describes her as smart, social, confident and a leader in class. “She made me realize deaf people can do anything—and she can do anything she wants,” Demma says.
Savannah will have taken 11 AP classes by the time she graduates this spring. She is active in the Health Occupations Student Association, which promotes biomedical and health-related careers, and was ranked fifth in the state for her achievements in a biotechnology competition.
In college, Savannah plans to double major in global health policy and biomedical engineering. To encourage more students like her to consider pursuing science, she organized a STEM fair for deaf students this winter. Savannah has shared her experience with families of deaf students as part of a countywide Montgomery County Public Schools panel since she was a freshman. “I explain to them what I’m involved in to reassure parents that deaf children can be successful if you give them the right tools,” she says.
—Caralee Adams
Emmi Sellman
Academy of the Holy Cross
Varsity volleyball coach Dave Geiser recalls when his Academy of the Holy Cross team was losing a match last fall that he thought it should be winning. During a timeout, he was expressing his frustration in the huddle when his star player, Emmi Sellman, spoke up.
“She said, ‘We just got to be positive.’ I was like, ‘OK, OK,’ ” Geiser recalls. “She ran the rest of the timeout. We easily won, and it was a good lesson for me.”
Keeping a positive attitude and learning to move on from mistakes are the most important lessons that Emmi, 18, says she’s learned while becoming one of the country’s top-ranked high school volleyball players. “Learning to deal with frustrations because, you know, you might make a mistake, but then you have the next point to play and you don’t want to make another mistake,” she says.
To Geiser and others, those attributes define this student-athlete, whose resume includes playing for the U.S. women’s national teams, age 19 and under in 2022 (as an alternate) and 2023, and age 21 and under in 2023. A Burtonsville resident, she was named The Washington Post’s All-Met Player of the Year in 2022 and 2023.
Named Holy Cross’ most valuable player in 2023, Emmi led her team to four consecutive first-place finishes in the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference regular season and to the championship in 2023, when she was co-captain.
Emmi, an outside hitter who was Gatorade’s 2022 Player of the Year in Maryland, is also listed at No. 5 in Prep Dig’s 2024 national high school rankings. Recruited by Ohio State, she is now studying veterinary sciences at the university after graduating in December from Holy Cross in Kensington.
Nominating Emmi for the 2023 Gatorade Player of the Year award, Geiser wrote that she was “the single best all-around player on the team in each of her seasons,” combining that positive attitude with “a high level of athleticism with an exceptional work ethic.”
Emmi dreams of playing volleyball in the Olympics, but she also is focused on coaching and mentoring younger players, and on volunteer work. “I really do like to use my talents to help others,” she says. “I think that’s definitely something that defines me.”
—Julie Rasicot
Guillermo Molina
Don Bosco Cristo Rey High School
While maintaining top grades, working as a waiter and serving a corporate internship, 17-year-old Guillermo Molina makes time for his main passion: music.
The Silver Spring teen says “music has been a foundation for my learning” since he began playing the drums around age 1. “I even have video evidence of playing percussion since I was very little,” he says.
Guillermo explores his passion with Façade, a student band he co-founded at Don Bosco Cristo Rey High School in Takoma Park, where he is a junior. The band performs at school functions and plays a variety of music, he says.
“Think [Frank] Sinatra to modern music, like we’re talking about the 2010s, all the way back,” he says. “Right now we’re starting to move towards a lot of Hispanic songs because that’s what Don Bosco Cristo Rey is really about—adding a lot of diversity, and that’s what we’re trying to do, as well.”
Student interest in the band led the school to offer a music class this year to juniors and seniors who want to learn how to play instruments, according to Angel Sanks, the school’s chief impact officer for innovation, integration and teacher learning. The school hopes to build a music program in the coming years, she says.
Guillermo, who plans to be the first in his family to go to college, says the new music class showed him how even a small group like the band’s founders could create change at the school. It was impactful, he says, “for all of us just to see how something could change in very, very little time, like a group of four to really, you know, change a whole lot, the whole school and how the system really works.”
Sanks, who taught geometry to Guillermo, says the teen stands out for his kindness and willingness to help others as much as his music and leadership of the band. Guillermo is the assistant leader of one of the school’s 12 houses, which are groups of students that represent all grades.
“He’s just a genuinely nice person. And he’s always willing to help anytime. You don’t even have to ask him,” Sanks says. “That’s the biggest thing for me is just how incredibly kind he is to everyone.”
—J.R.
Stephanie Muoka
Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School
Quillian Haralson, a Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School science teacher, often tells his students to take advantage of the opportunity to tap into the expertise of faculty at the many colleges and universities in the Washington, D.C., area.
Not many of his students at the all-girls Catholic high school in Northwest Washington, D.C., take his advice, Haralson notes.
But Stephanie Muoka, Haralson’s student during her sophomore year, did just that, cold-calling and emailing about 100 professors at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland. She landed an ongoing internship that year at the University of Maryland SENSE Lab and has focused on researching the impact of carbon emissions in different District neighborhoods, finding that low-income areas suffer more.
“She is passionate about science, and she’s one of those students that I know, when I look down the road some years, she’s gonna be doing some amazing things because she just has that tenacity to get where she wants to go,” Haralson says.
Stephanie, a senior who lives in Silver Spring, says she’s focused in her research and other activities on being “an advocate for people who don’t have the resources to do so
themselves,” especially as she’s learned about racial and socioeconomic disparities around her. “I become sort of passionate about just making sure that we spend more time focusing on supporting those who can’t do it themselves,” she says.
After volunteering with her lab team at the Boys and Girls Club of America in D.C., Stephanie was inspired to create a program called Project STEM4K to provide more STEM opportunities to students in marginalized communities through mentorship, resources and lesson plans.
In addition to her research, Stephanie, 17, helps raise money and run donation drives for Project Pink Tax, an organization dedicated to providing people in need with menstrual products. At school, she’s co-president of the Mathletes club, an executive board member of the Black Women’s Society, and president of the Visi for Reform club.
“I love talking to so many different people in so many different clubs, just because I love, like, branching out,” says Stephanie, who plans to study mechanical engineering and computer science in college.
—J.R.
Digonto Chatterjee
Thomas S. Wootton High School
Digonto Chatterjee designed a science fair project in middle school using open-source databases to analyze gene mutations in cancer patients. He has been fascinated with genetics research ever since.
Digonto went on to land internships at Bethesda’s Uniformed Services University, the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and RTI International, a nonprofit research institute. Researching genes of pancreatic cancer patients by racial category, the 18-year-old from North Potomac discovered the vast majority of data was only for white patients. “That led me to look at the lack of diversity in clinical trials and got me interested in health equity,” he says.
His research has led to recognition among his peers and professionals. Digonto co-authored a chapter in a cancer and biology textbook and has presented his findings at professional events, such as a conference of the American Association for Cancer Research in April 2022. He was a runner-up in the 2022 Maryland BioGENEius Challenge.
Among his leadership positions at Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Digonto, a senior, is captain of the Science Bowl team, which has grown from 10 students in his freshman year to more than 20. He also volunteers with the Science Bowl team at Robert Frost Middle School.
“I really like helping younger students get interested in science,” Digonto says. “I try to be very passionate about the competition myself and create a friendly space where kids don’t feel intimidated to try.”
Digonto has a calming presence with the high-energy middle schoolers that is very effective, says Cheryl Levine, a science teacher and Science Bowl coach at Frost. “He’s so down to earth,” she says. “He stresses, ‘Make mistakes now. We’re here to help you.’ He’s super supportive, but in a very quiet way.”
Combining his interests in science and debate, Digonto co-founded Darch AI, a free artificial intelligence-powered debate evidence search engine.
Aside from academics, Digonto enjoys music—specifically, the tabla, a drum used in northern Indian classical music that he has played since he was 8 years old. “It’s a very different style of music, almost entirely based on improvisation,” says Digonto, who performs solo and with groups.
Digonto has been accepted to the University of Pennsylvania, where he plans to study bioengineering and will likely pursue a career in research.
—C.A.
Allison Xu
Walter Johnson High School
Walter Johnson High School senior Allison Xu has always loved to write, but she began to truly discover her own voice while exploring other writers and participating in online writing groups during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We all share this common passion for words, and getting to interact with all these different types of people really reinforced my love for writing and poetry,” she says. “And that really motivated me to spread this love for words to various other people and communities.”
Allison, who lives in Rockville, is focused on using her writing to explore the transformative teen years and to provoke thinking about social issues. In 2023, she was named Montgomery County’s youth poet laureate by Words Beats & Life, a hip-hop-based arts educational nonprofit in Washington, D.C. In that one-year role, Allison has promoted arts and literacy among young people and performed at local events, including the American Courage Awards hosted by the D.C.-based nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice. She also has collaborated with local public libraries to offer free poetry workshops.
In addition, Allison, 18, is an online editor-in-chief of her school newspaper, The Pitch, and of The MoCo Student, a local student-run online publication, as well as senior editor for Polyphony Lit, an international student-run literary magazine. Her work has appeared in more than 30 magazines, journals and anthologies. She was an honorable mention winner in the high school essay category of the 2023 Essay and Short Story Contest co-sponsored by Bethesda Urban Partnership and MoCo360. She also received the 2022-23 Fran Abrams Creative Writing Award given by the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County for her skill and commitment to creative writing.
In September 2021, Allison founded Simply Soft Skills, an international team of 16 high school and college students that provides resources to help students develop soft skills, including leadership and teamwork, through a website and in-person events. She plans to study economics or public policy and business in college.
Though Allison has accomplished much and has received numerous awards for her work, she remains humble, says Kathy Simmons, her AP U.S. history teacher.
“There is not a single part of her that has any sort of arrogance,” Simmons says. “I think one of the things that makes her so successful is that she honestly, in everything she does, she wants to do better.”
—J.R
Dechen Dyson-Marshall
Oneness-Family Montessori High School
After attending a national Montessori for Social Justice conference in Chicago last June, Dechen Dyson-Marshall was inspired to do a diversity audit of their school’s library.
They reviewed 600 books at Oneness-Family Montessori High School, recommending that about 50 be retired (including outdated books about Christopher Columbus and Thanksgiving), and that others about African Americans and equity be added. The goal, Dechen says, was “to have a library that is both reflective of us and that evokes learning through multiple perspectives.”
The 17-year-old senior from Silver Spring pitched another project in the summer of 2022: to design a self-discovery space for students at the private school in Chevy Chase. With a $10,000 budget, Dechen purchased furniture and created a room where students could meditate, relax and collaborate.
“What makes Dechen an extraordinary student is that they’ve had both a physical and cultural impact,” says Andrew Faulstich, a social studies teacher. “They are stewards of our school’s culture in terms of support, mentorship and kindness they show in our community, but also they’ve physically transformed space in really meaningful ways.”
As a teaching assistant in U.S. history, Dechen facilitated discussions on the Colonial settlement of Jamestown for two weeks last fall (with another adult in the classroom), when Faulstich was away. “They respect me essentially as a staff member,” Dechen says of their classmates.
Dechen is a leader with student government, the yearbook, the school’s annual fall fair, and many community service activities.
“Dechen is a pillar in the community. They are seen as someone you can go to with any of your problems or challenges,” says Amber Bhatti, an English teacher of Dechen’s for three years. “They have a wisdom that goes beyond their years.”
Dechen wants to become a mental health counselor for adolescents. Curious about American Sign Language, they suggested their school offer an ASL class, which has led to an interest in working with the deaf community. In college, Dechen plans to major in psychology and minor in gender studies and deaf studies. In their spare time, they love to do research and play the ukulele.
—C.A.
Joshua Cohen
St. Andrew’s Episcopal School
Joshua Cohen was in third grade when he switched from piano to organ lessons. He was drawn to the sounds of an organ on his digital keyboard and looked up pictures of massive cathedrals with organs that had more than 10,000 pipes.
“I’ve always had an affinity for complicated things and how they work—and had a passion for music,” says Joshua, 18, a senior at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac. “I just kind of got hooked and haven’t moved away from it.”
Accepted to Harvard University, Joshua plans to study music and likely another field in the fall, although he’s not sure what that will be.
Joshua has become an accomplished organist, performing at his school’s graduation ceremonies at the Washington National Cathedral. His initial interest in playing the instrument expanded to understanding its mechanics. He has volunteered with a crew that restores and tunes pipe organs in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. In ninth grade, during the early days of the pandemic, he built his own digital organ in the basement of his Rockville home and has taught himself about sound recording.
No matter what the subject, Joshua has a sheer intellectual curiosity to learn, says his English teacher, Morgan Evans. “He’s just voracious and driven to be as good as he can at whatever task is in front of him,” Evans says.
Joshua is one of the editors-in-chief of The Mane News at St. Andrew’s. In addition to effectively keeping the staff organized, Evans says, Joshua taught himself to do layout, help redesign the publication and bring back a print version of the student newspaper.
At St. Andrew’s the past two years, Joshua has challenged himself with a seven-class academic schedule and thrived, according to Ginger Cobb, head of school. “No other student has accomplished such a rigorous schedule before in the history of the school,” she says. “He’s very talented, but he’s very understated, respectful and flies under the radar.”
Joshua says his fascination with the organ includes its cultural significance and history, as well as the technology and music. “Anything I’m interested in, in some way relates to the organ,” he says. “It kind of acts as a lens to view everything else.”
—C.A.
Shirin Ghorbani
Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School
One Saturday a month, senior Shirin Ghorbani and fellow students at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School head to Ward 7 in Washington, D.C., where they set up a stand to provide free fresh produce to residents of the underserved neighborhood.
The students are members of Fresher Choice, a school club that Shirin started in September 2020 after learning about District neighborhoods that are considered food deserts because they lack local grocery stores and transportation for residents to get to other areas.
“I found that a lot of these people living there, because they can’t access fresh produce from a grocery store, they have to resort to fast food, which could lead to a lot of health conditions,” says Shirin, 17, who lives in Bethesda.
She learned about leadership and establishing a community venture by participating in a program offered by LearnServe International, a District nonprofit that equips high school students with the skills to tackle social challenges.
More than three years after forming Fresher Choice, Shirin receives donations to supply the stand from a variety of sources, including social media and GoFundMe, and has established partnerships with community groups including the Marvin Gaye Greening Center, an urban farm in Ward 7. Club members, who number about 40, volunteer one Saturday a month at the farm. Barbara Paulsen, master gardener and volunteer coordinator at the urban farm, says she is impressed by Shirin’s mission, communication skills and commitment to volunteering with her club. “She showed leadership and initiative and consistency,” Paulsen says.
Shirin’s other big passion is her blog, TBHBaking, where she posts photos and recipes of desserts that she’s made, including Iranian recipes from her childhood.
Though Shirin will leave the club behind when she graduates, she is confident that other members can continue its mission to help others. “I just feel like there’s a lot of big problems in this world,” says Shirin, who plans to study economics in college. “So these problems seem really difficult to handle and they definitely are, but if we try to just put our best foot forward and all make small changes … at least some change can be made, and some change is always better than no change.”
—J.R.
Ruth Tilahun
Rockville High School
As an intern for the Montgomery County school board, Rockville High School senior Ruth Tilahun has discovered that she has the power to make change.
Now in her third year of service, Ruth, 18, says she has learned a lot about the legislative process at both the county and state levels while advocating for issues such as providing free school breakfasts and lunches, safeguarding children’s online interactions, and restricting firearms in designated areas, including schools.
“I really just learned that you have to kind of speak up and talk about the issues that you care about,” she says. “I feel like a lot of people struggle to understand that they have power, and that they have the ability to really make that change and help make what they want a reality. Doing these experiences really helped me realize that it is something that’s totally in my capabilities.”
When she’s not dealing with school or legislative issues, Ruth is focused on researching public health policy, which she plans to study in college. Her interest was sparked by her childhood experiences with asthma, which was not diagnosed correctly when she was a young child in Ethiopia. Her family moved to Wyoming when she was 4, and later to Montgomery County. As she grew up, she became aware of health care disparities throughout the country.
“I have always just been interested in seeing…the amount that a country spends on health and stuff and how that relates to health outcomes,” says Ruth, who lives in Rockville.
A top student in the International Baccalaureate program, she volunteers in the mother and baby unit at Adventist Healthcare White Oak Medical Center in Silver Spring, helping younger moms with their newborns. At home, Ruth helps care for her two younger siblings; her mom, a midwife, died of cancer when Ruth was 16.
IB Coordinator Laurie Ainsworth has no doubt that Ruth will be successful at whatever she chooses to do.
“Her passion for the causes that are important to her is one thing, but there’s also the passion for learning,” says Ainsworth, who has taught Ruth. “This is a kid that just likes to learn about so many things.”
—J.R.
This story appears in the March/April issue of Bethesda Magazine.