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P.V. 17-year-old unafraid to tackle hard questions
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While most high school students were hanging at the mall or movies, 17-year-old Paradise Valley resident Albert Shieh was discovering a way to identify the gene that causes Alzheimer’s disease.
The Chaparral High School graduate spent over a year developing a computer program that would make it easier to discover the genetic basis for diseases like Alzheimer’s, autism and bipolar disorder.
“By studying the changes in the DNA we can track what genes mutate and which diseases they are associated with,” Shieh said.
His work won him a $10,000 scholarship from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a nonprofit organization that recognizes, nurtures and supports profoundly gifted students.
He and the 16 other scholarship recipients will be presented with the award at a banquet held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in September.
“Albert’s work stood out in terms of being essentially graduate-level work done by somebody who’s not yet in college,” said Colleen Harsin, Davidson Institute director of services. “Not only is Albert interested in something that is well beyond what his age peers are typically investigating — he’s doing something about it.”
This is the third scholarship Shieh has won for the project. Last year, he was awarded first place in the Siemens Westinghouse Competition, a prestigious science competition. And in May he and his project partner Anne Lee, a former senior at Phoenix Country Day School in Paradise Valley, won $100,000 from the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix.
Despite those accomplishments, Shieh is modest about his work.
“Everyone is good at like something,” Shieh said. “Just because I’m good at academic subjects doesn’t necessarily make me smarter than other people.”
While working on the project, Shieh also held an after-school job at a corporate research company and took on extra classes to be able to graduate a year early. He will attend Harvard in September and wants to major in mathematics.
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