Daniel has a varied list of hobbies, including computers, stamp collecting, swimming, chess, checkers, drawing and basketball. He also runs his own business to generate funds for his goal of becoming a cancer research physician.
"My mother, a civil engineer, easily passed her love of math and science on to me," says Daniel.
Daniel lost his grandfather to lung cancer and has devoted many science research projects to his memory. For this project, Daniel was interested in researching lung cancer treatments. In his research, he read that French smokers have lower cancer rates than their American counterparts and that resveratrol (found in the grapes of wine) may be a factor. He decided to study the effect of resveratrol on lung cancer cells.
Daniel worked with a Carnegie Mellon University scientist to expose A549 (lung cancer) cells to resveratrol. Based on the data he collected, he concluded that when A549 cells are exposed to resveratrol, the cells' growth rates decrease. He hopes to continue this research by pairing the resveratrol with the antioxidant vitamin E, a known fighter of cancer.
