With 30 individuals represented from 15 wide-ranging categories, such as art & style, finance, sports, social entrepreneurs, and games & apps, the total list amounts to 450 brilliant young minds (and bodies).
Here are some of the exceptional folks with Jersey ties on the Forbes list:
The youngest New Jersey native on the list appears to be 21-year-old baseball star Mike Trout, the 2012 American League Rookie of the Year and center fielder for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Raised in Millville, Trout still lives with his parents in the off-season and has a soft spot for his local burger joint Jim’s Lunch.
Professional soccer player and Princeton native Michael Bradley has the distinction of being the youngest player in the Major Soccer League to be sold to a European club. Bradley is the first American to play for the Italian club AS Roma.
After Mendham local Maggie Doyne graduated high school in 2005, she took a gap year before college and traveled to Nepal with the help of non-profit LeapNow.org. There she discovered thousands of orphans who lost their parents in the recent civil war. Using $5,000 she had saved from babysitting back home, Megan built the Kopila Valley Children’s Home and School to care for and teach many of these displaced children.
Carter Cleveland, 26, co-founded his startup Art.sy in 2009 while studying computer science at Princeton. The website is a free platform that helps art enthusiasts and galleries discover new artwork that meets their preferences. Users can follow artists to hear about new exhibitions or sales. Many prestigious art dealers and collectors have backed the startup, including Wendi Murdoch, Peter Thiel and Larry Gagosian.
Another Princeton graduate who made the list is Nigerian-American Uzoamaka Maduka, the 25-year-old founder of the American Reader. As the Editor-in-Chief, Maduka ensures the new monthly literary magazine is hip enough for its 20-something target readership.
The list doesn’t just praise individuals behind startups and non-profits. New Jersey native Ranga Dattatreya, 29, made the list as the vice president of investment banking giant Goldman Sachs.