Alisha Jones

Hearing her full name yelled through the house, a young Alisha Jones —Jonesy to nearly everyone—knew she was in trouble. Inspired by a chemistry class, Jones had started experimenting with bathroom supplies, mixing them together and looking for a reaction. She stored premixed concoctions in old hair care containers and hid them at the back of her closet to pull out for science demos with friends. Her mother had just stumbled upon the containers and inadvertently used one. "Basically, she put bleach in her hair," Jones says. "Very powerful bleach." Luckily, a trip to the salon remedied the error, and this first hard lesson on the importance of clear chemical labeling didn't scare Jones, or her family, away from chemistry. In fact, she says her parents encouraged her to pursue science. Now Jones runs her own lab at New York University, where she combines traditional experimental methods with computational modeling