Julia Brodsky
H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program
Julia Brodsky was always good at math, but it wasn’t until she took her first calculus class that she realized its mind-bending potential.
“Math had always been a thing you plug numbers into and you just do computations,” says the Arlington teen, who turns 18 in July. “Calculus isn’t like that; you have to think outside the box.”
By her junior year at H-B Woodlawn, Brodsky was taking multivariable calculus and was a teaching assistant in a BC calculus class.
By senior year, she was studying linear algebra online through Johns Hopkins University and doing an independent study in number theory.
Science is another passion. After staging a science fair project on electrocoagulation, which showed how electrical currents could be used in wastewater treatment, Brodsky was accepted to the Virginia Governor’s School for Mathematics, Science and Technology. She later worked as a paid apprentice at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, conducting (as her supervisor described it) “PhD candidate-level” microbiology research.
In 2023, Brodsky was named a top 300 Scholar in the 82nd Regeneron Science Talent Search. “She’s self-motivated to an extent that’s really unusual,” says Liz Waters, her adviser at H-B. “She has always been fascinated by the world around her.”
Outside the classroom, Brodsky played the oboe in the school jazz band, was co-president of H-B’s Best Buddies chapter, and co-captained the crew team at Washington-Liberty. “The mental hurdles you have to get through to do crew are intense,” she says, “but made me a better person.”
Brodsky took 10 AP exams, earning the highest possible score (5) on all of them, and is fluent in Italian. She graduated with a 4.35 GPA and will attend MIT in the fall.