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At the age of just 17, Pooja Chandrashekar has developed an app that analyses speech patterns to predict whether a person has Parkinson’s disease and set up a nationwide organisation to encourage young American girls to pursue careers in technology and computer science.
And that’s not all – she’s also scored an admission to 14 top US universities, including all eight Ivy League schools.
At Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a top-ranked school in the US, Pooja stands out among her “brainiac peers” with her 4.57 grade-point average and a score of 2390 (out of 2400) on the SAT, the Washington Post reported.
Besides the eight Ivy League schools, the only child of engineers who migrated to the US from Bengaluru was also accepted at Stanford, MIT, Duke, the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech.
Getting admission to one Ivy League school is a rare achievement for most high school students in the US and it is extremely rare for a student to get accepted at all eight, though a few manage to do so each year. This year, Long Island student Harold Ekeh announced he too had been accepted at all the Ivy League schools.
The mobile app Pooja developed analyzes speech patterns and predicts with 96% accuracy if a person has Parkinson’s disease.
She founded ProjectCSGIRLS the summer after her sophomore year as a “response to the gender gap that was glaringly noticeable in her computer science classes”, according to the non-profit organisation’s website. It works to cultivate a love for technology and computer science amomg girls and encourage them to pursue interests and careers in these fields.
Pooja spent her summers attending programmes in robotics. She tinkered with web design and game programming. In middle school, she built a windmill to explore the prospects of renewable energy.
She attended the private Nysmith School at Herndon in Virginia before enrolling at Thomas Jefferson High School, where she studied computing, artificial intelligence and DNA science.
“She loves creative writing, organising and participating in hackathons, making people laugh, traveling, and tasting good food. Pooja aspires to pursue a career at the nexus of medicine, computer science, and tech entrepreneurship,” according to the ProjectCSGIRLS website.
Her guidance counselor, Kerry Hamblin, said she was dedicated to pushing herself in the classroom, which helped her to stand out. “She’s taking the hardest courses, the most challenging that we offer, and has exceeded anyone’s expectations in all of them,” he said.
Pooja said she decided to apply to all eight Ivy League schools hoping to get into just one of them “because college admissions is really unpredictable.”
“They are all fantastic schools, so I couldn’t discount any of them,” she told Washington Post. “I wanted to make sure I could get into a really good school and have more choices.”
Pooja has narrowed her list to Harvard, Stanford and Brown, where she got into a programme that guarantees her admission to the university’s medical school.
As a summer intern at the MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit organisation that operates research and development centres sponsored by the US government, Pooja impressed older colleagues by working on a diagnostic tool for determining early signs of mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI), said James S Ellenbogen, chief scientist of emerging technologies at MITRE.
“Pooja helped improve a model that could mimic the human response to a simple test for mTBI,” said Michael Fine, lead engineer in the MITRE neurotechnology group. “Her work may eventually allow us to optimise the diagnostic test, which should further improve the accuracy of the results when it is administered to patients.”
Despite her accomplishments, Pooja is like most other teenagers. She enjoys watching TV shows like Shark Tank, listening to Bollywood music and exploring restaurants.
Meet Pooja Chandrashekar, 17, who got through all 8 Ivy League Schools
