Jill Portnoy '06 is making a reputation for herself as a rising star in bio-criminology. She has studied juvenile nutritional imbalance and to what extent it can lead to behavior problems, conducted research on resting heart rate and antisocial behavior, and is shedding new light on the causes of risky behaviors.

In an era of online data breaches and fake political ads on Facebook, it's easy to throw up your hands and say that privacy is dead. Jonathan Zittrain '87, a Harvard University expert on the internet and ethics, is an in-demand scholar, panel moderator and essayist on the subject.

Fu has promoted baseball all over the world, traveling to places like Australia, China and Latin America. The outreach work is just one way she has combined her legal and business background with her love of sports -- a passion that was nurtured during her years as a standout athlete at Shady Side Academy.

Booker, a former safety and defensive back for Shady Side Academy and Kent State University, is now defensive coach for the Tennessee Titans.

Like many brothers, Jordan and Grant Foley grew up as equal parts good friends and fierce competitors. The boys would go head-to-head in basketball, football and baseball — each win or loss was another round in their never-ending game of one-upmanship. Jordan, the more serious one, was four years older, but Grant was determined to keep up and scrappy enough to hold his own.

Despite their geographical differences, Marc Harrison '82 and Leon Haley '82 have kept abreast of each other's promotions in the ever-changing world of health care. The two former classmates know what it's like to work hard and achieve great success in the same field.

At 7:20 a.m., Ashley (Dalton) Forsyth dove into the ocean off of the Big Island, Hawaii, among 1,200 of the best female athletes in the world. Limbs flew in every direction – she took elbows to the side and kicks to the head. Swimmers shoved their way over and ploughed underneath her as they jostled for position.

When a thin 16-year-old boy with deep dimples stepped onto the stage at the Friday Night Improv in Oakland, the raucous late-night crowd did a double-take. Wasn't he a little young for this? Shouldn't he be at a high school football game – or in bed?

One evening in fall 2012, Ben Portman came home from his job as a financial manager, took off his tie, rolled up his sleeves and let his culinary imagination fly. He whipped up a dish of pureed parsnip, sautéed kale and pan-seared scallops. For his finishing touch, he sculpted a candle out of bacon fat. When his dinner party guests took their seats, he lit the candle and the bacon fat drizzled over the dish, setting off a chorus of ooohs and ahhs from his friends.

When Lance Labun boards a plane, he wears a wool jacket, cotton socks and a long-sleeved cotton shirt. He believes a person should dress up for flying, but his wardrobe is more than a sartorial choice. He wears natural fabrics because he knows that synthetic ones melt in the event of a fire, which would decrease his odds of surviving a crash.

Every weekday, millions of people sip coffee and tune in to Good Morning America, joining Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos and Michael Strahan for the latest headlines. But the TV audience doesn't see people like Nia Phillips, who spent much of the night gathering and producing the news.

After graduation from Shady Side Academy – and before heading off to Princeton University – John Duff spent the summer of 1959 almost suspended in time. He and four good friends filled their days with tennis, warm memories from high school and anticipation of what was to come.

At age 14, Reid Van Lehn '05 played a sci-fi video game, but he wasn't content to just zone out and rack up points. Using his self-taught computer programming skills, he created code to change the game into a Special Forces combat adventure, the type of modification the manufacturer encouraged its gamers to create and share with each other.

Jesse Shapira '95 sat up in bed at 5:30 a.m. He was wide awake. From his Hollywood Hills apartment, he nervously scanned the Oscar website on his laptop. For the executive producer of Room, this was it - the moment the Academy Award nominations would be announced and the culmination of six months of ups and downs through the film awards season.

As a teenager, Marisa Muscari '01 would play video games with her two older brothers, but it was just a casual pastime, playing FIFA and GoldenEye 007. So she never expected to land a plum job in the video game industry.

On Sept. 11, 2001, David Puth '74 was in London for a JPMorgan Chase global management meeting when someone whispered in his ear about a plane crash across the Atlantic. Minutes later, he and fellow bankers stared aghast at TV images of two towers of the World Trade Center burning.

Alyssa Smaldino '07 has 64 stamps on her passport, so many that they spill over to a second book. And she earned them far from the tourist trail in some of the poorest places on earth.

In the summer of 2002 Daniel Gilman '00 climbed the steps of the U.S. Capitol building, walked through its gigantic bronze doors and felt as though he had stepped on to the set of the hit TV drama The West Wing. After passing through security and getting his government ID, the 20-year-old redhead's sense of exhilaration and awe only deepened.

Some college deans spend all day holed up in their offices. Not Margaret Hazlett. On any given day, she's out on the lush campus of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., hashing out party guidelines with fraternities, cheering on the field hockey team and nudging student government leaders toward a smoke-free campus.

Jim Berkman has never been one to take homework lightly. Not at Shady Side Academy. Not at Harvard College. Not at Oxford University. As the head of school of Boston University Academy, he assigns himself homework for the first two weeks of each fall term. He learns the name of every incoming student at the small private high school located on the BU campus.

Inside Mission Control at SpaceX headquarters, Matthew McKeown stares up at three computer screens that are monitoring a spacecraft about to blast toward the heavens. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6...

Dr. Chris Meyer's teenage son programmed the Siri app on his dad's iPhone to say the following salutation: "Hello water animal nerd." Meyer, after all, is a research zoologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. Despite the groundbreaking research he conducts at one of the most famous museums in the world, he knows how to laugh at himself.

Every semester, Omar Matadar '00 stands at the lectern and speaks in flawless Arabic to the new crop of students at the Qasid Arab Institute in Jordan. He greets diplomats, journalists and many other Westerners who have traveled here to immerse themselves in a language that is soaring in popularity.

The minute Benny Shaffer landed in China, his senses went into overdrive. The junior at Shady Side Academy took it all in — the aroma of lamb kebob barbecue wafting from street vendors' grills, the masses of people streaming by, the flash of red and yellow neon.

Melena Ryzik had never taken an acting lesson, but there she was doing a cold reading opposite famed leading man Michael Caine. In his distinctive British accent, the star of Alphie, Educating Rita, The Cider House Rules and dozens of other movies flawlessly delivered his lines, utterly upstaging the New York Times cultural reporter.