Windham High School senior Sierra Yost graduates next week with a varied and lengthy resume. She’s an athlete, an environmentalist, civic-minded and active in school groups, not to mention outstanding in chemistry and the proud maker of “flat whoopie pies.”

A three-season athlete, Yost ran on the cross-country and indoor track teams and plays lacrosse in the spring. She has served as the secretary of her class and the National Honors Society, she’s a member of the Outing Club, Varsity Club and the Spanish Honors Society and is involved with two annual theater productions. She’s the salutatorian of her class and the student representative to the Regional School Unit 14 board.

What is consistent throughout those accomplishments, according to her chemistry teacher Lisa McLellan, is Yost’s energy, enthusiasm, inquisitive nature and desire to learn.

Yost will be among the 280 Windham High School seniors graduating Sunday, June 12, at the Cross Insurance Arena in Portland.

During her sophomore year, Yost took Honors Chemistry and the college-level  Advanced Placement Chemistry during her junior year with McLellan. Her interest in chemistry stems from a fondness for laboratory experiments and the logical nature of the work, she said.

She has “an aptitude for science, learns quickly and has both an impressive memory and well-developed problem-solving skills,” her teacher said.

Yost helps to inspire learning among other students, McLellan said. Her enthusiasm and confidence are strengths that keep her focused during lab experiments – “testing, redesigning and improving her method, each time getting closer to an ideal solution,” McLellan said. During a laboratory problem-solving competition in AP Chemistry, Yost “found more ways to use the materials and solve the problem than I had ever thought of,” she said.

Bringing her zeal for chemistry to the kitchen, Yost also enjoys baking and tinkering with new recipes for cakes, cookies and other sweets. Her favorite baking experiment is a flat whoopie pie, made with a “secret ingredient.”

Yost will major in chemical engineering at the University of Maine’s Honors College this fall. The program, she said, “is fantastic. It will be challenging, and I’m really excited.”

McLellan encouraged Yost to pursue chemistry because few students “have the natural ability for the subject plus the desire to work hard.”

In addition to her passions for athletics, mixing chemicals in the lab and mixing up inredients in the kitchen, Yost is passionate about the environment.

She was ahead of the game when, in 2011, she tried to ban plastic bags in Windham, going before the Town Council to make her case. She made quite a splash – she was written about by a number of press outlets, and she drafted a bill for the state Legislature with Rep. Jane Pringle that would have allowed municipalities to ban or tax the bags.

An eighth-grader at the time, Yost got the idea when learning in science class about plastic and how it doesn’t biodegrade. Plastic bags “are a huge cause of pollution in the ocean and elsewhere,” she said.

The plastic bag ban has not been adopted in Windham. It’s a cause Yost would still get behind, she said, “but there’s not enough time in the day.”

After graduating from college, she plans to work in a laboratory and eventually get a master’s degree in business administration and become the head of a production plant.

Her mother, Marla Pettinelli Brown, a teacher, and father, Rick Yost, a Realtor, come from a business background.

“It’s in my blood,” she said.

Among her goals for the future is to make Maine’s paper mills more environmentally and economically sustainable so “we can open them back up and bring more jobs to Maine.”

Ultimately, after working as an engineer, she wants to save her money and open a bakery, she said.

Sierra Yost will be among the 280 Windham High School seniors graduating Sunday, June 12, at the Cross Insurance Arena in Portland. She has attended the district’s schools since kindergarten. “There are a lot of great opportunities here.”