Mapping Friendships with Future Science Leaders

Science World’s after-school program Future Science Leaders presented by Acuitas Therapeutics connects teens to their science-enthusiastic peers and STEAM experts. Our partners make FSL possible: Acuitas Therapeutics; Boeing; RBC Foundation; AMGEN; STEMCELL Technologies; and NumerixS Quant. 

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This is a story of two boys from different towns who, without meeting, attended the same after-school science program and then applied to the same American university.  

Dan attended the first year of Science World’s teen program, Future Science Leaders (FSL), in Surrey. The next year, he completed FSL’s Engineering stream in Vancouver. He says both these years helped inspire him to apply to the University of Pennsylvania.  

Pierre lived in Vancouver and attended two years of FSL at Science World. But, because he completed the Research stream, he and Dan didn't meet. Pierre agrees the program helped with his application to Penn as well.  

Dan and Pierre ended up meeting by coincidence in a group chat of mutual friends.

They connected over a love of golf and planned a casual round at Riverway Golf Course on a Saturday morning in spring. There, on the first hole, Dan and Pierre discovered their shared path: they were both completing major scientific projects through FSL, and they'd both enrolled in pre-med courses at the University of Pennsylvania.  

“It was wild,” says Dan. “But that’s one of the perks of Future Science Leaders. It connects you with people you’d be friends with anyway." 

Pierre laughs, “If we hadn’t ended up in that group chat together, we may have finished FSL and gone off to Penn on our own.” 

Future Fields 

Today, both Pierre and Dan are loving Penn, and are grateful for their time spent in Future Science Leaders learning advanced techniques and skills that prepared them for their rigorous university coursework.   

While in FSL’s Research stream, Pierre conducted experiments on bacteria and antibiotics, pursuing an interest he’d found in a 2017 BBC article predicting that, by 2050, antibiotic resistance would cause 10 million deaths and cost the world 66 million pounds. 

Today, he’s taking pre-med classes at Penn, including a minor in healthcare management, with the dream of one day opening his own clinic as a private physician. 

 

Pierre says he views the current challenges in America’s healthcare system as an abundance of opportunities for innovation, and that he wants to be a part of that.  

Attending FSL’s fieldtrips to different STEM businesses helped expand Pierre’s understanding of the field of medicine: “It got me excited about the idea of one day, from the physician’s side, working with those kinds of businesses to develop technology that delivers the best, most efficient healthcare possible.” 

Starting Up 

Meanwhile, in his first year at Penn, Dan has already founded a biotech start-up of the sort that Pierre imagines working with one day. Dan also credits FSL with supporting him with the tools to help accomplish this.  

In FSL’s Engineering stream, Dan used Python to code computational models that investigated the roles of magnesium and NDMA receptors in Alzheimer’s disease.  

The more he experimented with this kind of mathematical modeling, the more excited he got about its potential to vastly improve complex medical processes, like surgery.  

Today, Dan takes biomedical engineering at Penn and, in his downtime, works on his start-up for cardio-biomedical devices. 

He can’t share the technology, because it hasn’t been patented yet, but he’s using computational modeling to improve processes for the mapping of the human heart.  

A leap in this kind of technology would improve catheters, and procedures like cardio ablation and cardio stenosis, saving innumerable lives.  

Dan says that connections he made at FSL with STEM professionals from places like Acuitas Therapeutics, Stanford, NASA and more have helped guide him through some of unknowns related to founding a start-up.  

“I never would have thought that the kind of grown-ups we met at FSL would have the time or interest in supporting me, but they really do.”  

Both Dan and Pierre agree, though, that at the end of the day, perhaps the best benefit of FSL is bonding with other teens with shared interests.  

Ending up at Penn together, so far away from their hometowns, has been a comfort. 

“Having fun with a friend can get you through something that is otherwise challenging" says Pierre. “And you’ll definitely have fun in FSL. And you’ll definitely make friends.” 

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Applications for Future Science Leaders are open until May 1, 2024. Click here to apply.