I met Lina Colucci yesterday evening when the smell of free food lured me into the exhibit hall. (Years of graduate school have left me with a finely tuned sense of where to go to find free food.) There might have been a few hundred people milling around the hall, but Lina was easy to spot, standing there looking professional and confident in her grey suit and pink ballet toe shoes.

Lina was presenting a poster at the American Junior Association of Science exhibit. Poster topics ranged from testing swimsuit materials to designing better rocket fuel. Lina, a high school senior, ballet dancer, and amateur engineer, wants to design a toe shoe that won’t leave dancers with bunions or sprained ankles. It’s a tough project – the shoes need to be rigid enough to provide stability but flexible enough to, you know, allow the ballerinas to dance. So far she’s torn apart shoes, modeled them, developed fiberglass shanks, found them too brittle, and now plans to move on to a carbon composites. She’ll take the project with her to college next year, she says.