Five with UW links named to Forbes 30 under 30

Leila Gray UW Health Sciences/UW Medicine

In the 2011 Forbes 30 under 30, issued Dec. 19, 3 of the young scientists and 2 of the technology leaders have links to the UW.

From the worldwide selection of accomplished young adults, Forbes chose 30 under 30 in several other categories, including law and policy, entertainment, music, finance, food and wine, real estate, social and mobile, and media.

Named were:

Daniela Witten, 27, an assistant professor of biostatistics in the UW School of Public Health who joined the UW faculty at 26. She develops artificial intelligence programs to crunch genomic data to try to decipher how genes lead to diseases like cancer

Jeffrey Kidd, 28, a recent UW genome sciences graduate student who trained with Evan Eichler and other notable UW researchers. Kidd is noted for using DNA sequencing to understand the forces that shape the evolution of primates, including apes and humans. He has now been appointed assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

Sarah Ng, 27, a UW graduate student training in genome sciences with Jay Shendure and other renowned scientists at the UWs Northwest Genomic Sequencing Center and the new Mendelian Genomics Center. She is using advanced sequencing methods to identify the genes that cause rare diseases.

Jacob Applebaum, 28, is a staff research scientist in the UW Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His work is on computer security and privacy, with an emphasis on anonymity, censorship resistance and network filtering. He is noted for uncovering security flaws in software.

Sidhant Gupta, 27, is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering under the mentorship of Shwetak N. Patel. He is developing low-cost, easy-to-deploy sensors for conserving energy in the home.