WESTPORT–Staples High School has named the top two students for the Class of 2026.

They are Isabel Jo, valedictorian, and Uma Choudhury, salutatorian. Both will be speakers at graduation, which is set for June 15, on the Staples football field.

School officials say both young women, who have attended Westport Public Schools since elementary school, are standouts beyond the classroom.

Valedictorian

Jo, who will attend Dartmouth College in the fall, interned last summer at Yale University EpiTET Therapeutics, Inc. a start-up company run by Yale.

In addition to science, Jo excels in music, playing both viola and violin. She has also spent a decade as a competitive horseback rider and is an active member of the school’s No Place for Hate organization.

Her interest in music started at Coleytown Elementary School and continued through Coleytown Middle School. Instructor Jim Andrews gave her a great foundation, she says. At Staples, she is concertmistress of both the Symphonic and Chamber Orchestras.

She said her four years of orchestra classes were among her favorite at Staples.

Her interest in horses began even earlier when her family’s hunt for houses in Westport took them past a barn. Jo said she was fascinated.

She rides now at the Fairfield County Hunt Club and competes in equitation – the highest level of jumping – at national events. In May she’ll do her senior internship at the Hunt Club, working with horses.

With No Place for Hate, Isabel helps educate younger students about bullying and bias, during Staples’ Connections periods.

At Dartmouth, Jo plans to study chemistry, as well as statistics and music.

Jo downplays her achievement of earning the highest grade point average among the 400-plus students in this year’s graduating class.

“So many kids work hard. There’s so much luck involved, in being .01 point lower or higher.”

Salutatorian

 Choudhury’s path to salutatorian was similarly unplanned, and equally well-rounded.

A black belt in taekwando, Uma is also captain of the Staples’ Science Olympiad team, is president of the Math Honor Society and helps out at a summer camp.

She spent last summer as a research intern at Boston University, working under Prof. Alina Ene, benchmarking Optimal Transport algorithms on various datasets.

As a taekwando black belt, Choudhury said she has learned to “do things I couldn’t have imagined doing.”

In the Science Olympiad, Choudhury’s main events were code busters (math-related decrypting and end-crypting cyphers), and physics-related circuits and electricity. She earned a gold medal in ecology last year, after medaling in code busters as a sophomore.

Her freshman Applied Algorithmic Design course – a programming class with Nick Morgan – sparked an interest in computer programming. It combines her passions for math, physics and biology. She hopes to pursue it in college, perhaps in a research capacity.

But the scholar was also excited by her junior year Contemporary World Studies class, with Cathy Schager.

“We looked at issues, researched them and discussed them,” she said. “When you’re caught up with academics you can’t always see what’s going on in the world. But Ms. Schager was very helpful, and made sure we did.”

Other inspiring teachers, according to Choudhury, included Noreen McGoldrick, an English instructor who helped Uma become a better writer and reader, and Philip Abraham, whose AP Statistics Class was “interesting, fun, and applicable to lots of different fields.”

 As for achieving a top GPA, Choudhury said it was not something she set out to do.

“I just wanted to do well for myself,” she says. Her selection as salutatorian was “a happy surprise.’

Choudhury will do her senior internship at Citizen Invention, a Westport-based science education program, before heading to Carnegie Mellon University in the fall.