Cameron Sharma is a real life Doogie Howser. A seventh-grader from Virginia, he’s already earned a perfect 800 score on the math SAT and has been offered a $160,000 college scholarship.
And while he enjoys a good game of ping pong, he’ll spend his summer working with his dad to develop a vaccine for MRSA, an infection caused by a type of antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria.
His interest in medicines, especially bacterial infections, is already well established and has landed him in the Johns Hopkins University mentorship program for exceptionally gifted children.
Cameron came to national fame after he developed a mathematical model to predict what strain of the flu that WHO vaccine developers should anticipate in creating for the annual flu vaccine.
According to Cameron’s website, FutureFlu:
“The A/Michigan/45/2015 strain recommended by WHO shares a 100% proteomic identity with A/Montana/04/2016 recommended by FutureFlu, with eight synonymous nucleotide differences between the two strains.”
In layman’s terms, that basically means his model was on point. It was based on looking at virus strains from the past 100 years and it managed to predict the needed constitution of the 2017-18 flu vaccine.
The young scientist has a long list of more predictable wins already under his belt, including first prize from the science fair, learning trigonometry in third grade and differential calculus in fifth, and taking the top ever score for his chapter in the State MathCounts Competition.
What comes next is anyone’s guess, though Cameron likely has it well calculated.
