Zoe Denn Zuro has always been in love with science ever since she entered an Adler Planetarium summer program during seventh-grade exploring space, her parents Brad and Indira Zuro proudly explain.
Zoe was among 17 students from around the country who won a very competitive fellowship last year from the University of Chicago’s “Chicago Quantum Exchange” called the “Open Quantum Initiative” where students can learn more about quantum sciences.
She was assigned as a part of that prestigious program at Argonne National Laboratory last summer, working on exploring diamond defects as they relate to quantum sciences, using photons and laser analysis. The program is part of Q-NEXT, which brings together the world’s leading minds from the national laboratories, universities and technology companies to solve cutting-edge challenges in quantum information science.
Led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, Q-NEXT focuses on how to reliably control, store and transmit quantum information at distances that could be as small as the width of a computer chip or as large as the distance between Chicago and San Francisco.
And that led to Zoe, 21, whose parents live in the Village of Lyons, to receive a summer internship this year at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source program in Lemont, where she is currently working.
“It’s all amazing. It’s quite an achievement,” her parents Brad and Indira Zuro said.
“It’s based on academic performance. Argonne is a prestigious national laboratory. They get applications from not only around the country but from around the world for these internships. It is very competitive. We are very proud of her.”
The interest in sciences that led to Argonne began when she entered the Adler Planetarium program, her parents said.
“She helped design and build a weather balloon, and they launched it from the Adler Planetarium. Then the students tracked it with a satellite,” Brad Zuro recalled.
“She was very excited. The interns drove out to where it landed somewhere in the farm fields of Indiana to recover the data to understand weather data. That was her first exposure to science.”
Her parents said that Zoe always had a strong aptitude for mathematics. They praised her continued education at Morton West High school for reinforcing her understanding of science and math.
“She has always been a great student. She’s received perfect grades throughout her whole time she was at Morton West. She took as many AP classes as a student can take at Morton West. I think she did six or seven different AP courses in her last year of high school,” Brad Zuro said.
“Morton West High school was great. They offered those AP courses and she loved them all, the challenges of each one of them, including Chemistry and the highest Math. She won a scholarship to UIC and is in their engineering and physics program. It’s been great so far.”
Lyons Mayor Christopher Getty said the entire community was proud of Zoe.
“She is exceptionally talented and we as a community are very proud of her,” Getty said.
Zoe’s major at UIC is focused on biological sciences studying the workings of human cells to further advance the discovery of cures, her parents said.
Before graduating from Morton West with honors, and attending UIC, Zoe attended Lincoln School in Brookfield then Washington Middle School. She returns to UIC this fall as a senior studying Engineering Physics.