Mariah Gladstone has found a recipe for success in her online cooking show Indigikitchen. Its name blends the words “Indigenous,” “digital,” and “kitchen,” and her weekly recipes, tips, and social media videos aim to reIndigenize the diets of Native Americans while tempting all viewers to opt for healthier diets. Her Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube posts have won her thousands of followers and interest from book agents and publishers.

Growing up, Leah Creaser spent much of her time with her friend Taylor adventuring behind their older brothers. Those excursions typically involved heading out on four-wheelers to some water and dropping a line to see if they could catch anything. While she didn’t always come home with dinner, Creaser did catch a love for fish. She is currently completing a bachelor’s degree in biology with a focus on fish science at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

Completing one bachelor’s degree is impressive, but Joseph Lance Casila completed three in four and a half years while at the University of Guam — a BS each in math, chemistry, and biology. Casila is resourceful. He left high school wanting to pursue his interest in engineering, but the University of Guam didn’t have a full engineering program. So he created a course of study to meet his needs. “My initial plan was to major in math and chemistry at the University of Guam and use those courses to fulfill some requirements in an online engineering program I was looking into,” he says.

As a young girl, Kate Rahbari wasn’t sure she was smart enough to pursue an education in the sciences, let alone in medicine. “I was my own obstacle,” she says, explaining the “imposter syndrome” that gave rise to years of self-doubt. But today Rahbari has proven to herself — and the world — that she can reach ambitious goals. She now is well on her way to completing a joint MD/PhD program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).

Devon Parfait is grounded. Not in a bad way. As the future chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, he wants to protect his people’s land. His tribes live among the bayous of southern Louisiana. Each year 30 square miles of their fragile ecosystem wash away due to habitat destruction caused by hurricanes and other forces. 

Worse, his Native communities lose land at twice the rate of other low-lying areas. 

When Victor “SALSA” Lopez was a high school junior in Houston, he had two competing summer internships to consider. One was a NASA Pathways Internship at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The other was helping to produce a video for an emerging local rapper. At age 16, Lopez was all about the video shoot. But the project fell apart, and fortunately, NASA was still an option. At Goddard he worked on research trying to predict landslides and earthquakes — an experience that fundamentally shifted his future path.

When she was young, Connor Keane’s mother moved more than 2,000 miles from her home community of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, to find work that would support her family. Through perseverance and determination, Keane’s mother overcame the challenges of being uprooted from her home and opened a store in Yellowknife to sell a variety of goods to the local community. 

Calvin Foster took the Second Fleet to “war” a few months ago. As deputy battle director, this U.S. Navy captain supported his admiral in the command of warships, submarines, aircraft, and unmanned systems. But the war game wasn’t staged in the Atlantic — it took place in cyberspace at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla. “We simulated operating several hundred assets. Getting to see that big picture and applying it across the whole naval spectrum was pretty exciting,” says Foster, a member of the Muscogee Nation who graduated from the U.S.

Melissa Anderson says her academic work at the University of Manitoba is right in line with her “extreme interest” in engineering and physics. Anderson is Ininew, from the Fox Lake Cree Nation in northern Manitoba, and her path into higher education reflects her consistent passion for STEM studies. 

Luke Schrimsher is using alignment lasers to build an optical X-ray system. “That’s the fun part of the job,” he says. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Schrimsher works as an engineering technical associate in the Nondestructive Evaluation Group at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.