Do you ever wonder what happens to those amazing kids who win major spelling bees?

Wonder no longer:

Of the 85 kids who have won the National Spelling Bee, only one became an instant movie star.

For the millions who watched back in 1999, her face is frozen in time. She’ll always be the 14-year-old girl from Tampa, Fla., with the glasses and dark shoulder-length hair, her arms raised while leaping for joy.

But that was a half-life ago for Nupur Lala. Like all bee winners, she’s since had to deal with the perks, drawbacks and stereotypes that come with the title — all magnified because she won the same year the competition was featured in an Oscar-nominated documentary.

She became a role model for those who realized it’s OK to be nerdy. She became a trend-setter, starting a run in which 10 of 14 national bee winners have been Indian-American, including the last five.

Today, she’s 28 and finishing up a master’s degree in cancer biology with plans to enroll in the University of Texas Medical School in Houston, having changed course from a career plan that had her researching memory and the brain for three years at MIT. She now aspires to be a physician scientist.

…Lala will be watching this week when the 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee takes place near the nation’s capital — her friends tease that her life “shuts down” during the bee — but she’ll see a spectacle that’s changed much since she graced the stage. The finals are now broadcast in prime time. A vocabulary test is being added this year for the first time. And the bee’s popularity has skyrocketed, in part because of Lala and the other spellers featured in the documentary “Spellbound,” a film that made smart people cool long before “The Big Bang Theory.”

“I’m amazed at the sea change,” Lala said in a telephone interview. “Because when I was a speller, that was one thing you totally hid. I remember like not even wanting to tell people what I was doing over the weekend when I was competing in the regional spelling bee. It was that big of a liability. And now I see that, yeah, people want to be nerds. I think that’s great.”

….There have also been a disproportionate number of recent winners interested in the brain and medicine, including several who said they wanted to grow up to be neurosurgeons. Lala pursued an undergraduate degree in brain, behavior and cognitive sciences at the University of Michigan, in part because of her experiences from the bee.