Then eighth grader Stuti Dalal sat down at her computer, wrote out her message, hit command ‘C’ and sent the same email to multiple doctors at Kansas University Medical Center: “My name is Stuti Dalal and I am going to be a freshman at Shawnee Mission East High School next year. I am very interested in science research and am looking for a project mentor.”
Most times, her emails were immediately moved to the receiver’s trash bin or she would open her Gmail to a simple “you are too young” response.
“Usually the issue is getting into a lab,” now senior Dalal said. “When you email them and say ‘I’m in eighth grade, can I come to your lab?’ they’ll just be like ‘Yeah — that’s cute.’”
But the countless rejections she received in seventh and eighth grade never discouraged her from scientific research. Today she’s studying neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s in a unique way, less focused on studying the memory and movement loss often tied to the diseases. Dalal thinks too many people already research that. Instead, she focuses on how specific proteins related to these diseases have effects on a patient’s eyesight.
According to Dalal, she is one of the only biomedical researchers in the world focusing on this aspect of the disease — and she’s only 17.
When Dalal would visit her great uncle Bihari in India, she questioned why he not only suffered from Alzheimer’s, but also vision loss. As his world began to blur together, Dalal became curious. Dalal realized very little research had been done on how Alzheimer’s could affect her great uncle’s ability to make out the faces of family members. So Dalal decided to put on a lab coat and find out herself.
“Most times when people are like, ‘I have Alzheimer’s,’ doctors and physicians will focus on the fact that you have memory loss,” Dalal said. “But people and doctors don’t focus on the changes that you have seen in your eye. Because the eye is such a big way that people understand the world around them, it’s many times worse to have ocular symptoms than it is to have memory loss.”
For the past three years, Dalal has chosen a different disease to research. Sophomore year she focused on Parkinson’s. Dalal used the process of Western Block, which injects antibodies in certain cell or tissue samples to detect certain proteins and their role on iron regulation in the eye. Her junior year she investigated if a protein had an effect on glucose regulation, which in turn could offset diabetes — a common precursor to Alzheimer’s. And now, Dalal is taking her work from sophomore year and applying it to Alzheimer’s.
All of Dalal’s research has taken place in the pathology department of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Since her father works in Cleveland, she spends her summers and longer breaks at Case Western culturing cells, staining antibodies and dissecting mouse brains and cow eyes.
Dalal is always the youngest person in the lab, but she’s learned to use her age as an advantage instead of letting it hold her back. She has found that the PhD candidates and medical students who constantly surround her are always willing to teach her how to use equipment and how to perfect certain techniques.
Once Dalal steps foot in the lab, she finds her age no longer an issue when the lab team sees the perfect way she prepares solutions and the advanced technique she uses to grow cells. While most scientific researchers get their first paper published during graduate school, Dalal was just named one of the authors of a science abstract in Experimental Eye Research Journal last May for her junior year research.
Dalal has been doing neurodegenerative disease research for three years, but she started her “extracurricular” biomedical research in the seventh grade. Her first research project was testing if tumeric had an effect on the lifespan of cancer cells. Dalal started off “slow” by learning how to culture and grow cells, but quickly moved up to using a hemocytometer to count the number of cells that survived her experiment.
“When she was in fourth grade, we introduced her to do some experiments,” Dalal’s mother Sangeeta Dalal said. “After middle school, she did most of the work. We just provided the transportation. She has a good heart and it is difficult for her to see human beings suffering and wants to help humankind by developing new scientific methods.”
Dalal has entered all of her scientific research in the Greater Kansas City Science and Engineering Fair and the Junior Sciences and Humanities Symposium since the fourth grade. She has gone from studying what material should be used on a roof to trap the most heat to submitting data that proves Alzheimer’s is much more than just memory loss.
Through these competitions, Dalal has earned a spot competing at JSHS nationals the past two years — she received first place at nationals her junior year. She has also placed in the top three in the Greater Kansas City Science and Engineering Fair, sending her to internationals.
With Dalal’s lab equipment and research team stuck in Cleveland, she’s found support for her research in physics teacher Miles Martin’s room. Dalal, who took AP Physics as a sophomore, showed Martin her research Powerpoints and data, explaining how she wanted to compete in science fairs.
Martin became a mentor to Dalal, helping her find the right competitions to compete in and even setting up mock presentations for her. He asked other physics, biology and chemistry teachers to judge Dalal’s presentation performance and give tips on how she could make her project more comprehensive for people in all types of scientific fields.
“Some of the research [Dalal] is doing right now is very similar to the science research I did at the masters level,” Martin said. “[Dalal] is very much of a go-getter. She has a very clear-cut vision of what she wants, which has helped her shape her research.”
Dalal thinks it’s incredible that researchers believe her Alzheimer’s studies as a 17-year-old could one day help not only her great uncle see — but also give hope to a population of Alzheimer’s patients whose worlds have blurred around them.
“This is my way I can give back to society,” Dalal said. “It’s a really unique feeling because at this age, I am able to do something that has an impact. It makes me feel really lucky that I have used the opportunities I have been given. It is really nice I can now do something for someone else.”