Daniel enjoys skateboarding and playing football and guitar and is also a member of the Math Club and Engineering Club. He would like to pursue a career as an automotive engineer, as he spends a lot of time "dreaming, sketching and planning what the next generation of personal vehicles could be."
His parents are Daniel's mentors, and they encourage him to "stick with a project and improve the experimental method until it works."
Daniel developed his project after reading about a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study that showed that calorie restriction in yeast extends its lifetime. Daniel learned that one of the physiological changes that accompanies aging is the reduced ability of cells to repair DNA. For his project, he wanted to determine whether calorie restriction extends lifetime by enhancing the ability of cells to survive DNA-damaging Ultraviolet-C light exposure. Daniel hypothesized that yeast would have a higher survival rate after exposure to UV-C when cultured on a restricted-calorie medium.
Daniel cultured groups of yeast cells, one on a low-calorie medium and the other on a normal-calorie medium. He exposed the plates of cells to UV-C for 10, 20 and 30 seconds. He stored the plates at room temperature for four days and tabulated the survival/mutation rates. The results disproved Daniel's initial hypothesis and indicated that the cells exposed to the normal-calorie medium had a higher survival fraction.
