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INNOVATOR
MENTOR
CHANGEMAKER

Education

I am a Senior at the Academies of Loudoun and Rock Ridge High School. I am passionate about English, Latin, and Research. I am is taking classes in AP Latin, AP English Language and Composition, and AOS research. I also took online Coursera, Stanford, and Duke University courses in Machine Learning and Algorithms

Research

I am an avid researcher interested in applying machine learning to disease prediction and prevention. I built SOS 280-AI Substance Abuse Prevention App. I won Congressional app challenge 2021-3rd place in the VA-10 district. The State of Virginia passed a resolution commending my Innovative Leadership in changing lives.

Volunteering

I am the Founder, President of Coding Made Accessible a nonprofit working to close the socio- economic gap in STEM. I am also currently serving as CONRAD International Innovation challenge ambassador mentoring students competing for the challenge

Academic Teams

I am the Founder and President of the Artificial Intelligence/Machine learning Club at Rockridge high school. I share my knowledge and experience in Research, Community Organizing, Building Partnerships, Running social media campaigns, and Raising funds with my peers at school.

Awards, Scholarships and Publications

SCHOOL COURSEWORK:

AP Computer Science, AOS Biology, AOS Science research I/II/II, Latin IV, AP World History, English 10H, AOS Integrated Science III, AOS Math Analysis and Computational Modeling II, AP US History, AP English Language and Composition, AP Latin, AP Biology, AOS AP Calculus AB/BC

ONILNE COURSEWORK:

Stanford University: Organizational Analysis, Algorithms, AI in Healthcare
Duke University: Medical Neuroscience
Imperial College London: Mathematics for Machine Learning – Linear Algebra, Multivariate Calculus, Principal Component Analysis
SuperDataScience: Machine Learning A-ZTM: Hands-On Python & R In Data Science

SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS

Inexpensive detection of Substance Use Disorders Using Social Media Data Publication Link
Edge Technology Based Artificial Intelligence system for Ocean Patrol and Surveillance Publication Link

CONFERENCES AND PARTNERSHIPS

- Presented at Harvard vision Global Health Conference
- Invited to present at TEDx DIETMS
- Partnered with three housing authorities in Maryland and two national non-profits in substance use disorder recovery space
- Collaborated with: Celebrated American Biologist Carl Safina, Oceankind founder Evan Rappaport, and UN FAO Goodwill ambassador Chef Rodrigo Pacheco.

SCHOLARSHIPS AND GRANTS

Ashoka Change Maker & Taco Bell Ambition Accelerator Grant
National Museum of Education – Student Ideas for a better America scholarship.

HONORS AND AWARDS:

- Conrad International innovation Challenge Social Media Awareness Award Winner and Finalist (2022): For bringing awareness to the stigma surrounding substance use disorders with SOS 280 app.
- State of Virginia Resolution (2022): Commending innovative leadership in using technology to make a difference in society.
- National Society of high school scholarships – Be More Finalist (2022)
- Congressional App Challenge (VA-10) – 3rd place winner
- World of 7 billion – Best of state award (2020): For the “Together we can keep oceans safe” proposal.
- Toshiba Exploravision – Honorable Mention (2022)
- Microsoft Imagine Cup: Semifinalist
- Blue Ocean Challenge (2022): Top 250
- UAE 2070 Health Summit – Top 20
- Four-time Conrad Innovator. Health and Nutrition Category (2021 – Bias Detector Project, 2022 – SOS280), Energy and Environment Category (2022 – DEEPSEAS Project), and Smoke Free World Category (2022 – Smart Tobacco Alternative Project)
- US Environmental Protection Agency – Acknowledgement for the effort to protect human health and the environment

Research Projects

SOS280

SOS280 is an affordable comprehensive substance abuse detection and prevention mobile application that aims to revolutionize the global substance use recovery space allowing for early family intervention. Instead of expensive interventions at the Regular/risky Usage stage of cycle of addiction, , SOS280 provides intervention at Initiation & Experimentation phase. The app has a provisional patent.

Impact-

– Built a huge Social Media Campaign for bringing awareness around Substance Use Disorder stigma

– Reached out to 2000+ students to inspire them to become agents of positive change

– Built a core team of volunteers across seven states in the USA to scale the impact of the work.

– Obtained from Tacobell Ambition Accelerator Grant and National Museum’s Student Ideas for a Better America Scholarship

– Partnered with two national non profits in addiction recovery space

CVD and Hospital Readmission Prediction

The objective is to create a Machine Learning / Computer Vision supplementary tool for Clinical Diagnosis and patient health improvement. The goal is an aggregated Workflow of Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) Prediction, CAD Risk Scoring, Semi-Supervised Learning Enabled Hospital Readmission Prediction, and Saliency Mapping of MRA Images

Awards and Research Meetings:-

– Conrad Innovator 2021 award

– Colloborated with

* Mr Sean Cody, Deputy Branch Chief at the National Heart Lung and blood institute

* Dr. Emelia J. Benjamin, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Boston University.

*Dr Ting Fang, Research Assistant Professor at Boston University

*Dr Borek Foldyna, Cardiovascular Radiologist and Faculty member at Harvard Medical School

* Dr Tassiopoulos, Chair Department of Surgery at Stony Brook Medicine

DEEPSEAS

Worked with a team of high school students in building DEEPSEAS (Drone Enabled Environment Patrol & Surveillance Edge AI System), an environmental protection system for marine protected areas (MPAs) using low-cost edge computing devices to track illegal fishing activity through AI-based image recognition services. Our product has a broad range of potential applications to detect overfishing, piracy, smuggling, and instances of ocean pollution, including oil spills.

Awards:-

-CONRAD INNOVATOR 2022 award in Energy and Environment Category

– Toshiba Exploravision : Honorable Mention

– Applied for provisional patent

Clinical Trial Selector

Clinical Trial selector
(CTS) is aimed at making it easier for patients to find clinical trials related to their health conditions. I worked as a part of the CTS core team to help publish a research paper comparing CTS with other clinical trail options.

Coordinated 25+ outreach campaigns to Veteran affairs doctors and Veteran affairs publications to market CTS to a wider audience. Contributed to peer reviewed publication draft comparing Clinical Trial Selector with its competitors.

Know more about me

My First Love - Cricket

As an elementary school kid in India, there is one sport that I fell in love with – Cricket. In India cricket is not just a sport. It is a religion, a festival, and a celebration

The International Cricket Council World Cup was my first glance into Cricket as a sport. The watch-along took place at a large enclosed grass field at the heart of the apartment complex.

There is a multitude of factors that I was immediately drawn to. For example, watching fielders make dynamic, acrobatic catches that seemed to defy gravity and batsmen elegantly send the cork sphere soaring. But what stood out to me most was the pride members of my community took in the Indian National Team, even during losing games.

This experience motivated me to pursue Cricket as a hobby and competitive venture. So I signed up for a nearby training camp. After attending 5 AM practices for a few months, I was given a starting role on a local travel team, eventually playing against multiple other schools in the state.

In the weeks leading up to my move back to the U.S. in 2016, when I was 11, I experienced a culture shock as I had little exposure to American culture from media or relatives. While the area I moved into had a sizable South Asian demographic, many students were in a similar situation to mine before my residence in India. They hadn’t heard of or played Cricket.

Though I could no longer play Cricket in my school, I continued playing with my dad in Middle School. Then, one day, a neighbor saw my batting skills and asked me to join the local team. Though the group was primarily men in their 40s, I did not hesitate for a moment to say Yes. As a result, I now play for the Barnstead cricket team. My team recently competed and won at the county level.

I have been playing Cricket for over ten years. This sport has given me everything from teaching me teamwork to staying connected to my roots.

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My Tryst with Writing

While my 5th-grade teacher asked every other kid in the class what they aspired to do as adults, she asked me “Abhi, what type of fiction are you planning to write?”.

By then, it was already established that I was an avid reader with a flair for writing. I finished reading all the books in the school library in India. After that, I would routinely write short stories every week, and my teacher would display them outside our classroom.

My writing style would change every few months. It would be influenced by the author I was reading at the time. Writing served as my stress buster, lazy partner, and eccentric friend. When my parents announced that we were moving to the USA for middle school, I was worried because I knew it would not be easy to fit in and socialize. However, I was excited about the move because of the vast collection of books in the US public libraries. Having finished reading all the books in public and private libraries around my home in India, I was thirsty for a broader collection.

The first few days of middle school were tough. I struggled heavily to fit in and socialize. So many of my classmates have known each other from previous school years. Luckily, all my peers were reading harry potter at the time. We would sit and talk about Harry Potter and his friends, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley. I look back on this community I have become and wonder how different my life would be without them.

“You can make anything by writing,” said celebrated author C.S. Lewis. I keep writing. I wrote for fun. I wrote when I was bored when I was in pain, about my new love for basketball, about video games, my grandmother, and my dog molly, and most importantly, I write about what should not be forgotten.

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My Journey - Concussion and Aftermath

It was a special day that day. It was my 17th birthday. I was playing basketball with my friends. After an intense game, I stood on the side, trying to catch my breath, when the basketball fell on my head from a height of about 30 feet

My ears started ringing, and my head was spinning. My friends reached out to ask how I was doing. I quickly put some ice on my head. I tried to act normal for the rest of the evening. However, the following day I woke up feeling nauseous. My parents rushed me to the Emergency room, where I was diagnosed with a concussion.

I was asked to take rest and breaks from school work. When I got home, I stubbornly continued to push myself for another two weeks. I could feel my body and mind crashing, but I pursued the schoolwork single-mindedly. I was scared but also convinced that if I kept going through the motions of my life, following the schedule I set for myself, I would magically heal. Instead, my symptoms continued to increase. Finally, it got to a point where I could not comprehend a simple three-line passage.

I went to see my doctor, and he immediately referred me to the concussion clinic. I took all the tests in the clinic and failed each one. My nurse told me I had to slow down or prepare for a prolonged recovery. I reached out to my Dean, counselor, and school teachers and advocated for myself.

I learned many lessons in my concussion journey.

Lesson #1: Accept the new reality.

Once I started accepting my new reality, I realized I had more energy to focus on more critical tasks.

Lesson #2: Be in the moment. I had no control over when I would recover and how much schoolwork I would miss. So I focused on where I was and what I had control over.

Lesson #3: Be Flexible

During my recovery, I couldn’t achieve everything I had planned or wanted to do in a day or week. I either couldn’t do what I wanted to because my symptoms would flare up, or I would hit a wall, be exhausted, and need days to recover. Being flexible allowed me not to get frustrated on bad days.

Lesson #4: Create a Culture of Wellbeing.

I realized that my brain needed equal care as the other muscles in my body. So I enrolled in a yoga session that required me to be on strict two meals a day and 2 hours of meditation for 40 days and one hour for the next six months. With meditation, I observed the quality of rest, relaxation, and regeneration that is normally observed in the deepest stages of sleep.

My concussion leads me to become self-aware. After healing, I enrolled in EEG clinical trials that studied the effects of meditation and tested the coherence between the right and left sides of the brain. There were days I skipped breakfast and lunch to be prepared for brain testing.

I am glad that I can give back to the culture of well-being.

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Why I enrolled for the Clinical Trials at BIDMC

I was on cloud nine when I got accepted to Academy of Science Magnet School. I love research. I heard from my seniors that this school had a top-notch research program. I looked forward to wearing my lab coat and doing research in the lab.

At school, I was engrossed in looking at patient data, whether health readings or MRI and CT scans. I never thought my brain data would be available to researchers to study my brain activity. In 2018, my father shared a video of a Harvard professor titled: “Memory, Consciousness, and Coma.” The video was one and a half hours long. Though I was sure I would not be able to get through even the first thirty minutes of the video, I started watching it. I spent the next few hours watching the video multiple times. What struck a chord was that the celebrated Ellison “Jeep” Pierce, the professor serving as the chair of anesthesia, was looking at alternate options to reduce cognitive decline.

Fascinated by the video, I followed Dr. Bala’s work and read his scientific publications. In 2020, when I landed an opportunity to attend an in-person session with Dr. Bala, I did not think twice. I took a 2-day break from high school and took a 10-hour drive to Tennessee to attend the session. Inspired by his work in the field of pain management, I was determined to work with Dr. Bala’s team someday. My dream came true in the year 2022. After multiple interviews, I landed an internship opportunity with Dr. Bala.

However, A few months before the start of the internship, I had a mild traumatic brain injury (Concussion). I was worried that the pace of healing would not allow me to travel to Boston for the internship. I wanted to give my recovery process all I had. I decided to shift my lifestyle to a culture of well-being. I replaced processed foods with fruits and nuts. I decided to take the Isha yoga meditation to speed up recovery. I had to ask for a week’s break before the start of the internship to attend the meditation training sessions. Luckily, Dr. Bala’s team agreed to have me start a week later.

I completed the four-day intense meditation program. I now had to keep up with my daily practices. The meditation routine prescribed 2-hour practice, two meals a day for the first 40 days, and an hour of practice for the next six months. I knew it would be hard to keep up with the new discipline, especially moving to Boston and eating out, but I dutifully followed the routine. The food discipline was the toughest as I was used to small unhealthy snacks during the day.

I started healing slowly and steadily. Interestingly after about 25 days of meditation practices, I started feeling more alert than ever before. Amazed by the miraculous recovery, I started doing research. I found that a clinical study showed a higher level of coherence between the right and left sides of the brain for the practitioners.

My internship at Beth Israel deaconess medical center entailed studying the gamma and beta rays in the brain of participants in meditation. For the first few days, I worked on the research. A week into my internship, I applied for an opportunity to become a participant. I was asked if I was ready to not have my first meal until later in the afternoon as the study entailed the study of brain waves. At the same time, the participant meditated, and the empty stomach condition gave the best results. I was up for the challenge as the prospect of me researching my brain data was too exciting.

What followed was eight weeks of intense experience playing the twin roles of participant and researcher under Dr. Bala of Harvard Medical School. Those summer months were the most grueling and the most fun. I learned to multitask. Juggling my high school summer course, preparing for my SAT, 8-hour internship, and taking the hour-long uber rides back and forth from Boston city was a memorable experience. I feel great that my brain readings serve as data points for researchers studying the impact of meditation on brain activity.

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My lessons from watching doctors perform surgery at Stony brook medicine

I had the opportunity to shadow a heart surgeon in the operation theater this summer (2022). This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a high school student.

The surgery was done in under 30 minutes. Dr. T explained that back in the day, it used to take just over two hours to complete this same procedure.

They had to go in blind, mess around with stuff, take an x-ray, wait for the x-ray film to develop, then study the film to see what they did, plan out what to do next, then go back and continue the procedure with the new information and plan. Then, repeat those steps as many times as needed until the film showed that they were successful.

I walked out of the surgery room with enhanced respect for innovation. I learned that day that embracing true innovation is a requirement, not an option in the medical field.

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Reflections on CONRAD Innovation Challenge

I was in the hot seat, on a nice warm weekend in summer, a little over 4 months after I signed up to compete at CONRAD International Challenge. If you’re not familiar with the competition, check out this article in the Guardian. CONRAD is one of the oldest innovation competitions for high school seniors. It’s competitive. It’s exclusive. It’s rewarding.

I always intended to write about the finalist week because it was life-changing. In two days, I felt like I had gained an insurmountable amount of knowledge and life lessons. Each of the finalist projects touched a new, undiscovered, or under-studied part of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

I went through a nerve-wracking experience while presenting my finalist pitch. Our team of two people split the presentation: 1 person would present a slideshow, and the other would answer questions in a 10-minute Q & A Session. Unfortunately, while my partner was presenting their pitch to judges, there was a glitch with the presenting software. Despite this adversity, I stayed balanced and focused, answering questions articulately and precisely to the well-qualified panel of judges.

My resilience, adaptability, balance, and articulation helped me pull through the high-pressure situation. Our team competed against 40 finalists across multiple categories and won the “Social Media Awareness” award.

Beyond the award, the finalist summit was a gathering of some of the most talented individuals I have had the pleasure of meeting. I look back on this community I have become a part of and wonder how different my life would be without them.

And the best part is that I am now the Conrad Innovation Challenge Ambassador. I am working closely with the Alumni Leadership Council to further the mission of the Conrad Foundation and provide resources for students competing in the challenge.