Jeffrey Xu

Jeffrey Xu is a senior at Livingston High School. He is the captain of his school’s Science Olympiad and Science Bowl teams, president of its chapter of the Science National Honor Society, and founder of its chapter of the International Youth Neuroscience Association. This past summer, Jeffrey explored targeted drug therapies against lung adenocarcinoma at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Last year, at New Jersey Institute of Technology, he investigated microdroplet digestion, an ultrafast mechanism used in bottom-up proteomics. For this research, he was published as a co-author in the Journal for the American Society of Mass Spectrometry and won the Chemistry Category Award at the North Jersey Regional Science Fair. He also ideated a genetically engineered CO2-concentrating microcompartment system to maximize photosynthetic efficiency in rice cells, for which he was awarded an Honorable Mention from the ExploraVision competition. Outside of clubs and research, Jeffrey enjoys diving into diverse scientific fields through the USA Biology Olympiad, Chemistry Olympiad, and Brain Bee. The arts play important roles in Jeffrey’s life as well, especially poetry and classical piano, which he has been playing for 11 years. In the future, Jeffrey aims to serve as a physician-scientist who combats healthcare stigmas and inequities in marginalized communities.