Drew Ripberger is a recent high school graduate that will be attending The Ohio State University in the fall. He is involved with distributed systems research at The Ohio State and has competed at the highest level of science fair in the state of Ohio for his independent research on optimizing the Raft consensus algorithm. In the past two years he has founded and served as the chair at his high schools ACM Student chapter and is interested in pursuing further academic research at the university level. During the spring and summer of 2020 he served as a consultant working on open source software at Nirmata.