CLEVELAND — Lindsey Wang’s resume looks something like this:
- Nine published studies in highly respected medical & scientific journals, including JAMA, JAMA Pediatric, and Molecular Psychiatry.
- Featured in more than 1,000 news articles on CNN, FOX, and NPR, just to name a few.
- Avid violin player and computer programmer since age six.
- Senior at Orange High School.
“Everyone is like, ‘how can you get so much published?!’ and it’s just because I like to work on this a lot,” Wang said. “I work on this a lot in my free time, after school, and with the help of my principal and guidance counselor, I can do it during the school day now.”
Wang teamed up with researchers at Case Western Reserve University last summer, including Dr. Nathan Berger. He is a medical hematologist oncologist with more than 40 years at Case.
“First of all, let me say she’s brilliant,” Berger said of Wang. “People can’t believe it when we tell them this work was done by a high school student.”
Wang’s research has focused on the COVID-19 pandemic — analyzing vaccines, variants, long COVID, and more.
“We recently had one published about endocarditis, which is a heart disorder,” Wang said. “We also did one about new onset Alzheimer’s after being infected.”
Berger says her computer and informatics skills are incredible, and in his long, illustrious career, he’s never seen anyone so young published in medical journals so much.
He added that everything Lindsey does is peer reviewed internally by a team at CWRU, someone at NIH, and also by external experts in medical journals.
“So her work has really stood up to careful inspection,” he said.
Her research has already been used to implement public health policy and incorporated into CDC guidelines.
“It’s really exciting, she’s already made major contributions to the field of medicine,” Berger said.
And as impressive as all of it is, for Wang, it’s simply a passion.
She spends more than 30 hours a week on her research, and Berger expects her to publish half a dozen more studies before she graduates in the spring.
“I want to continue to do this, I want to help people, I want to inform people in this rapidly evolving pandemic,” Wang said.
In just a couple weeks, Wang will find out if she is admitted into her dream school - Stanford University. She hopes to go on to get her MD/PhD, combining her computer skills with medicine and artificial intelligence.
