Healthcare Shouldn't Depend on Where You're Born: A Three-Front Approach to Pediatric Health Equity

1Introduction

I'm Nathan — an aspiring physician-scientist from San Jose, California. This page is organized like a preprint because that is how I've learned to work: state the problem, do the work, publish the results, and revise. The problem is that a child's access to basic healthcare still depends overwhelmingly on where they happen to be born. Sections 2–4 document the academic foundation, the research, and the field program built against that problem; Section 5 gives the timeline, and Section 6 covers everything that doesn't fit a CV category but shapes all of it.

2Academic Record

All work reported here runs on top of a full accelerated honors / AP science course load at Valley Christian High School (through junior year): 4.08 weighted GPA, 1510 SAT (single sitting), and 6 AP courses — Biology, Chemistry, Psychology, English Language, US History, and CS Principles. Highest Honors in 10th and 11th grade, High Honors in 9th, and the School Recognition Award in 11th. Intended major: neuroscience / pre-med.

Beyond the school day: AP Biology completed through Johns Hopkins, AP Statistics through UC Scout (concurrent, senior year), and a dual-enrollment college statistics course at Santa Clara University (Young Scholars Program) — the inferential toolkit (z/t-tests, chi-square, regression) used to analyze FutureBright's pre/post camp surveys.

Research training: Polygence Research Program (grades 10–11, year-long mentored research), product research internship at reThink64 Bionetworks (grade 11), UCSC Health Sciences Impact Internship (grade 10), the Stanford Neuroscience Journal Club (grade 9), where I presented a study on gender differences in mouse neuroscience as a freshman, and the UC Berkeley Summer Springboard medical-preparation pathway (grade 9), a two-week residential program with physician lectures and a first CPR certification.

3Research

Eczema affects over 70 million children worldwide, and the long-term safety of its most common treatment is surprisingly under-studied. I approached the gap from three directions.

3.1  Literature review (first author)

"Adverse Effects of Topical Corticosteroid Usage in Children: A Review" synthesizes 20+ clinical sources on long-term topical corticosteroid safety. The abstract was published through the International Research Conference for Children; the full manuscript is under journal review [1].

3.2  Experimental disease model

I designed and ran a ceramide-deficient Drosophila melanogaster model of eczema's broken skin barrier, measuring a 7× staining difference in barrier permeability — roughly 80 hours of research and preparation. The poster, "Drosophila melanogaster as an Analogous Model for Ceramide-Related Eczema: A Preliminary Study," was defended before a specialist judging panel; I was selected as one of five awardees (Best Poster Award, IRCC) and also presented at the Synopsys Science Fair [2].

3.3  Applied AI

Under the mentorship of Jeffrey Moon (Curious Cardinals), I trained a binary-classification model that detects eczema from skin photographs — computer vision, image preprocessing, data labeling, and performance evaluation — publicly available [3], connecting the research back to the screening work FutureBright does in the field.

4The FutureBright Program

At 15, I co-founded FutureBright Inc., a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, because the organization I wanted to join didn't exist. FutureBright funds and organizes free health camps, donates medical equipment, and builds educational infrastructure — and publishes its results and financials openly. Principal results to date are summarized in Table 1.

Figure 1: The author addressing the community at the Ghana Health Mission, Abira Chiefs' Palace, July 2026. Queues formed from 7 AM; volunteer doctors from Kumasi and Accra worked past the planned close so no one was turned away.

Figure 2: (left) Volunteer clinicians screening patients in Abira, Ghana, with St. Joseph Catholic Hospital, 2026. (right) 500+ runners at the 4K Heartathon with Mission Hospital Pullur, World Heart Day, India, 2023.

Figure 3: (left) The chemical analyzer donated to the clinic at Vallarpadam, Kerala — on-site lab testing for a community that previously traveled hours for it, 2024. (right) The author with Sr. Maria Mathew of St. Joseph Catholic Hospital, partner institution for the Ghana Health Mission, 2026.

Funding statement. Operations are funded in part by the author's farm: 8–12 hours a week year-round, 40 laying hens, with every dollar of egg sales directed to FutureBright's projects. Attendee knowledge at health camps is measured with pre/post surveys and the findings published — outcomes, not anecdotes.

5Timeline

• 2023 — Co-founded and incorporated FutureBright Inc. (501(c)(3)) at age 15; joined the Kyle J. Taylor Foundation as volunteer and junior board member.
• Sept 2023 — 4K Heartathon with Mission Hospital Pullur, India: 500+ runners.
• Jan 2024 — Free cardiology camp, Kerala: 100+ patients; demand exceeded capacity.
• May 2024 — Chemical analyzer donated to the clinic at Vallarpadam, Kerala.
• 2025 — Literature review authored through Polygence; Drosophila eczema model wins Best Poster, IRCC.
• 2025–26 — School rises in Boassa, Burkina Faso: foundation January 2026, walls by March, opening targeted 2026–27.
• July 2026 — Ghana Health Mission: 400+ screened in one day at the Abira Chiefs' Palace.

6Beyond Medicine

Weekly clinical and community service at home in San Jose: CPR instructor and vitals documentation at three Kyle J. Taylor Foundation school heart screenings; Serving the Needy ministry at my Syro-Malabar Catholic parish since freshman year; two years at the St. Francis of Assisi parish gift shop; summer ambassador for the San José Public Library. My family's story begins in Kerala, India — which is why FutureBright's first health camps ran there. And the farm (Section 4, Funding statement) remains the least glamorous work I do, and the most reliable.

7Conclusion & Future Work

Medical school is the long-term goal — the ability to treat the patients I can currently only organize for. Near-term: growing FutureBright's screening model, opening the Boassa school, and pushing the eczema research toward journal publication. Comments welcome; this page is versioned and will be revised.

Figure 4: Malayalam-language press coverage of the FutureBright cardiology health camp, Kerala, 2024 [5].

References