High school says missing Yale student was an outstanding pupil

Yale University graduate student Annie Le was an academic standout at her alma mater, Union Mine High School in El Dorado, Calif., where at least one science teacher raved that Le was the best student she ever had.

"She was the kind of student you dream of having in your class," said Tony DeVille, principal of the 1,000-student high school from which Le graduated in the top 2 percent of her class in 2003, quoting Le's anatomy and physiology teacher, Audrey Goodis. "An outstanding student."

Those words of praise for the 4-foot-11 Le, who went missing while on Yale's New Haven campus Tuesday, were echoed by others who saw Le as a promising researcher who attended the University of Rochester and was later accepted into a challenging graduate program at one of the nation's most prestigious universities.

Le was a pharmacology student and a candidate for the joint MD-PhD degree at Yale.

"She was involved in the Culture Club, a well-rounded and well-liked person, very vibrant and down to earth, too," DeVille said of her days at Union Mine.

Le and her fiance, Jonathan Widawsky of Huntington - a graduate student at Columbia University - were in love and looking forward to their nuptials, friends said.

Bianca Marcolino, a third-year graduate student at Columbia who lives next door to Widawsky in Manhattan, said she has seen the couple together looking happy.

"I have seen her a couple of times," she said. "I have seen them doing laundry together. I know a couple of people at Yale who knew her."

Quoting Le's uncle, Minh Nguyen, the Yale Daily News wrote that he was shocked to hear of her disappearance. The newspaper continued that Le wrote on her Facebook page that she was excited about her wedding.

"Less than one week til the big day!" it said.

Le was a fixture in the lab where she worked. But she also found time to contribute to a newspaper catering to graduate students in biological sciences. She penned an article in February about how not to become a victim of violence in New Haven.

"She seemed like a real hard worker," Scott Bussom, a researcher in the pharmacology department, told the campus paper. "Always here, always doing something."

With Pervaiz Shallwani