The Davidson Institute for Talent Development has
announced the 2018 Davidson Fellows.
18-year-old Rajiv Movva of San Jose won a $10,000 Davidson
Fellows Scholarship for his project, SNPpet: Deep Learning the Human Epigenome
Reveals Regulatory Sequence Patterns and Genomic Mechanisms of Disease. He is
one of only 20 students across the country to receive this honor.
Named as the among “The 10 Biggest Scholarships in the
World” and one of the “7 Prestigious Undergrad Scholarships”, the fellowship is
offered by the Davidson Institute to students who are 18 years or younger and
who demonstrate the development of their talents with a significant piece of
work in science, mathematics, technology, engineering, music, literature,
philosophy or outside the box.
“After spending hundreds of high school hours thinking about
my various research questions, it feels great to be named a Davidson Fellow,”
said Movva. “What I’ve done certainly seems more important and valuable now,
and I’m further convinced that science is the path for me.”
Movva built a computer model that can use a particular DNA
sequence as input to predict gene expression level as output, which sheds light
on the poorly understood “dark genome.” In practice, Movva’s model could bring
clinical meaning to large patient-specific DNA sequence datasets that are
currently hard to decode. This advanced time frame can allow patients to make
lifestyle changes or be treated far in advance, when the disease has little
potential to have severe consequence. Movva’s model can also give researchers a
clearer picture of disease by flagging genes that are abnormally regulated,
prioritizing better targets for drugs and other treatments that remain to be
discovered.
Movva, who has lived in the Silicon Valley area his entire
life and attended The Harker School, is looking forward to exploring the other
side of the country during his upcoming college experience at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
The 2018 Davidson Fellows will be honored at a reception in
Washington, D.C., on Friday, September 28
The Davidson Fellows Scholarship program offers $50,000,
$25,000 and $10,000 college scholarships to students 18 or younger, who have
completed significant projects that have the potential to benefit society in
the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, literature and
music. The Davidson Fellows Scholarship has provided more than $7.5 million in
scholarship funds to more than 300 students since its inception in 2001, and
has been named one of the most prestigious undergraduate scholarships by U.S.
News & World Report. It is a program of the Davidson Institute for Talent
Development, a national nonprofit organization headquartered in Reno, Nev. that
supports profoundly gifted youth.
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