In the world of competitive skydiving, Ellicott City native Sriya Pothapragada considers herself a baby bird.

She’s jumped out of perfectly good airplanes a dizzying 69 times and recently competed for Clemson University at the United States Parachute Association’s National Collegiate Skydiving Championships. The doctoral candidate knows she must do it again — at least 56 more times — in order to compete at the extreme sport’s highest level.

Some people in the 23-year-old’s life wonder how anyone thrives in such intense conditions. It’s a question Pothapragada ponders elsewhere in her life.

As an evolutionary genetics researcher at Clemson, she has dived deep into the world of extremophiles — organisms that are able to live in extreme environments such as the deep sea, active volcanoes and even outer space. Scientists study these critters to answer big questions about early evolution and pinpoint genetic mechanisms that, if exploited, could bestow similar capabilities to other organisms.

Pothapragada first began kicking around questions about adapting to extremes back in 2019. The Howard County native was 18 years old and in the midst of reinventing herself as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland.

College was a time to break away from her self-image as a studious, first-generation child of Indian immigrants. Crossing a tandem skydive off her bucket list seemed like one way to do it.

Her first free fall over Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains was euphoric and the autumn foliage stunning. But Pothapragada couldn’t take her eyes off the camera flyer soaring through the air next to her. The woman moved with avian precision to snap photos of Pothapragada, who was strapped to a skydiving instructor, while simultaneously matching the tandem duo’s fall rate.

“I want to do that,” Pothapragada thought to herself.

A few years later, as she was shopping for Ph.D. programs, she noticed Clemson was also home to a skydiving club. She enrolled in 2023 and, within days of arriving in South Carolina, started taking solo lessons. Since then, she has trained with a partner to compete in two-way formation skydiving competitions against other colleges and military academies.

They placed fourth in their category at January’s USPA Collegiate National Championship, a contest typically dominated by the military schools.

Back on the ground, Pothapragada studies viceroy butterflies, a North American species capable of adapting its wing pattern to mimic either queen or monarch butterflies. Researchers in her lab are trying to understand how the insect’s genetic makeup helps it to adapt under different environmental pressures.

The butterflies are considered a model species that could help the scientific community better understand how other organisms, like extremophiles, adapt to conditions considered extreme to humans.

Vampire squids, for example, swim in deep waters where there is very little oxygen. Pompeii worms hang out along the chimney tops of scalding hydrothermal vents. Tardigrades, microscopic invertebrates sometimes called water bears, can survive in all sorts of conditions including high levels of radiation and pressure.

Pothapragada also adapted to extreme conditions as a skydiver.

“When that door swings open, the wind hits your face, you look down and everything is tiny — height and falling are intrinsically scary,” she said.

But she regularly bucks her mammalian instincts by jumping from heights of 3,500 feet to 16,500 feet. It has sharpened her common sense, reflexes and spatial awareness. However, too much comfort as a skydiver can pose a safety risk, too.

Pothapragada has adopted the extreme sport’s primary mechanism for helping skydivers tame the fear safely: prepare, prepare, prepare.

On the ground, Pothapragada and her competitive skydiving partner rehearse the formations they will make in the air, a practice called “dirt diving.”

She has worked on her upper body strength ever since an unnerving incident in which she lost her grip while dangling from a plane’s strut.

Most importantly, Pothapragada carefully packs the rig, which contains the parachute, a reserve chute and other safety trinkets, so she has peace of mind as she plummets to the Earth.

“It’s really about being meticulous, even after I have a thousand jumps,” Pothapragada said.

Her meticulous qualities as a student helped convince Mitsuo Kumagai, who studied bioengineering alongside Pothapragada at the University of Maryland, to skydive with her in 2023.

“Hearing her talk about that [skydiving] was one thing, but seeing her gear up was another,” Kumagai said. “She was so professional about it.”

One minute Pothapragada was giggling and chatting about her day, he said, and the next she was methodically checking and double-checking her equipment.

“Do it, follow the adrenaline,” Kyra Lawson recalled Pothapragada said to persuade her to try skydiving.

The two friends from Ellicott City first met around 2016, when Pothapragada was the only sophomore enrolled in Lawson’s Advanced Placement Environmental Science class.

Lawson said she never would have expected the person she met at Mount Hebron High School eventually would convince her to jump out of a plane.

“I thought we’d all turn out to be typical nerds working at a desk,” Lawson said.

Pothapragada said there comes a moment during every skydive when the sensation of falling dissipates. Her senses acclimate to the roar of the wind and the pressure on her face and limbs.

She feels like a bird flying high above the earth, and it’s what keeps her coming back again.

“You’re free, completely free.”