Aaryan Patel knew he wanted to go into a STEM field after his grandfather, who was also his closest family member, died from stage four lung cancer.
Following his dream, Patel was accepted into the Research Science Institute, a six-week, fully residential summer research program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focusing on STEM material: science, technology, engineering and math.
Recalling the memory of his grandfather, Mahendrabhai, he knew there was something more he could do.
“So, for me, it was just confusing at the time because not only was I a child, but it was just seeing how someone so healthy and so full of life, I just see him eventually reach a state of helplessness,” Patel said. “And despair that I wanted to figure out what was going on. And I started learning about also techniques such as diagnosis, in particular, because I wanted to learn how we could detect these things faster.”
He added that his motivation for beginning his research was due to wanting to figure out how to end rare diseases – starting with breast cancer, lung cancer and fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, which was something (similar in effect) to what a family member of his was experiencing.
“And seeing how this disease was so rare, I was figuring out, ‘OK, is there drugs out there that have been put out?’ And so far, the (Food and Drug Administration) has only one or two. And that really shocked me because why aren’t we focusing on these disorders even more, especially considering how much hardship they give toward others,” Patel said.
When asked about RSI, Patel said it is a research program to help students with independent STEM research at MIT. Mentors from Harvard, MIT, and other prestigious universities attend the six-week program.
He added that the program, which starts in June, requires its students to choose two different research interests and base it off the main field, which was computer science and artificial intelligence.
“I chose computational biology, which is basically taking computer science and learning how to use techniques of modeling and generative AI, in particular, to model things such as molecular structures, and even create drugs. So, drug design and drug discovery are one of the prominent fields, and that’s what I’m personally specializing in,” Patel said.
