“A few weeks after beginning my freshman year at Duke I e-mailed a professor in the chemistry department to ask if I could get involved in the research that his lab was doing,” she says. “He was extremely welcoming and got me started working on a project to analyze and model data from atomic force microscopy (AFM) experiments. I ended up using the programming skills that I was learning at the same time in one of my introductory engineering courses to complete the project. By the end of the year I had been included on a publication.”

“Two professors accompanied us to Uganda,” she says. “We worked closely with them in the field gathering data, running experiments, and learning about water supply engineering. Before coming to Duke, I never imagined that I would someday be hiking around rural Ugandan villages alongside civil engineering professors to test water samples for contamination.”

Last summer, after working on the engineering project in Uganda, Yamanaka went to England for the Duke in Oxford program. She took a course in Victorian literature -- her first English class since high school.

“I really liked the tutorial style of teaching at Oxford,” she says. “Arguing with your tutor for one or two hours about Jane Eyre’s salvation beliefs is much more interesting than just writing a paper about them.”

Yamanaka is accustomed to challenging herself. She is an A.B. Duke Scholar, a senior associate editor of Vertices: Duke University Journal of Science and Technology, the vice president of Duke Engineers Without Borders, and a member of the co-ed community service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega.

And her next challenge? After graduation she plans to pursue a doctorate in biomedical engineering, with a focus on how biomaterials can be engineered for drug, gene and vaccine delivery.

Duke has helped Yamanaka think about using an interdisciplinary approach to addressing issues or tackling problems. In one course called “Rebuilding from Ruins,” she heard experts from such diverse fields as epidemiology, geology, business, urban planning, civil engineering and religion discuss catastrophes and their aftermath. Then, over spring break, she and dozens of classmates traveled to New Orleans to work with a local branch of Habitat for Humanity on post-Katrina cleanup.