Mara Dimofte
Mara is an international student from Brăila, Romania. She graduated from the International Computer High School of Bucharest, where she was a full merit scholarship recipient all years of high school. At Columbia Engineering, Mara is excited to broaden her interest in STEM and to find ways to benefit the society. She intends to major in Mechanical Engineering.
Mara’s interest in research sparked from her love for science, specifically physics and astrophysics, and developed because of her desire to apply her knowledge for the benefit of others. She received numerous gold and silver medals in the National Physics Olympiad and in the National Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad and was a member of the Romanian Team for the International Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad twice.
In high school Mara became more interested in applied science. She started doing research at University of Bucharest, where she took part in a project about increasing the efficiency of solar cells. She worked with two heterojunction CdTe/CdS solar cells, aiming to improve their layering. Mara was awarded a Bronze Medal in the Romanian Science and Engineering Fair for this project.
Following this project, Mara was selected to take part in the prestigious Yale Summer Program in Astrophysics and to contribute to an astrophysics research project. She tracked asteroid 2002KL6, modelled its orbit and predicted the impact risk. The data were sent to the Minor Planet Center at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Mara’s most impressive achievement in high school is her published paper in Materiale Plastice Journal. She was the first and only high school student to research epoxy composite materials at University of Galati alongside professors and graduate students. She designed, fabricated and tested four composite materials with graded bending strength. Mara was the first author of the study published in Materiale Plastice Journal and in the SerbiaTrib proceedings.
Besides STEM, Mara is committed to giving back to her community. She founded the Interact Club in her hometown, Brăila, and managed to have significant contributions to the club even after moving to Bucharest. She was involved in teaching in the Astronomy Club in Brăila all four years of high school. Mara was also involved in organizing and leading IBMUN conferences. In her free time, Mara writes poetry and has won multiple awards for her poems. Her poems were published in 2018 in the prestigious Romanian Poetry Journal, “Vatra Veche”.