Ottawa student wins national science contest
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He was 15 years old, a Grade 10 student writing letters to one medical researcher after another, asking to come in and do HIV or cancer research in top-quality medical research labs.
Aditya Mohan was serious. Since elementary school he had been reading medical literature that most adults can’t decipher — journals including Nature, Cell, and PLOS ONE, where he searched out the latest on cancer and immunology.
One lab after another turned him down until Angela Crawley of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute took him in. She does HIV work.
On Tuesday it all came together: now 18 and in Grade 12 at Colonel By Secondary in Gloucester, Aditya won the Sanofi Biogenius Canada competition, a nation-wide biotechnology competition for high school students.
Some students build tabletop volcanoes for science fairs. Aditya Mohan built a virus.
More precisely, he re-engineered an existing one, giving the common cold virus a targeting system that makes it seek out cancer cells. Eventually this approach could help a virus to kill all the cells in a tumour while leaving healthy cells alone.
“It seems to be very promising,” he said.
There are several OHRI labs working on cancer-killing viruses already, and Aditya fit right in, said Crawley.
She worked with one high school student several years ago and it went well. Since then she hadn’t met a student at that level who impressed her until Aditya called.
“I met with him and I was blown away with his ideas,” she said.
“Immunology is not an easy subject… But he handles the complex and understands it at the higher level, the big picture, but also the minutiae of detail that’s required at the cellular level. And he’s able to connect different disciplines together.”
“A lot of this is based on research that I’ve done outside school,” Aditya said. “Just reading the journals and collaborating with scientists was something I developed an interest for in my spare time.”
“I had these ideas, and to test them out I knew I would need a mentor and knew I would definitely need help. I emailed pretty much as many professors as I could find.”
At the Crawley lab they had to start him with a lot of basics: How to use reagents (chemicals that make a reaction happen), how to use pipettes (small tubes for handling liquids).
He threw himself into the work, putting in three to six hours after school several times a week. Crawley, awed by his dedication, wonders how he found the time.
Two years later, “they’re still supervising me and still helping me out a lot, but they’re definitely giving me a bit more independence and (showing) more confidence that I won’t blow up the lab,” he said.
“I’m in an interesting situation where I’m kind of collaborating with multiple labs,” he says. The Crawley lab specialized in infectious disease, so it taught him a lot about viruses. But it doesn’t do cancer-killing viruses, so he works with other OHRI labs for that.
Born in the United States but raised in Ottawa, Aditya is narrowing down universities for next year but doesn’t know whether he’ll be in Canada or the U.S. He hopes to get a combined medical degree and PhD so that he can both treat patients and do research.
“The biggest thing that motivates me in science is the feeling of coming up with new ideas and testing them out.”
Aditya has just returned from another competition, the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, held in Pittsburgh. He brought home a $3,000 award.
As the Sanofi competition winner he receives a $5,000 prize (to be split with his school) and an internship at the National Research Council. He also qualifies for Sanofi’s international contest in June.
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