It was just another summer day for many high schoolers ā but not for three Bergen teens.
Mythreya Dharani, DaJeong Won and Jinan Laurentia Woo opened their email inboxes July 29 and learned, to their delight, that they had each won thousands of dollars in prestigious scholarships. They are 2025 Davidson Fellows and winners of a prestigious national award for “profoundly gifted” students 18 and younger.
The students share a total of $100,000 in scholarships, out of $825,000 awarded to 21 students nationwide by the Nevada-based Davidson Institute of Talent Development, a foundation set up in 2000 by educational software entrepreneur Bob Davidson. They are the only winners from New Jersey.
Dharani, a Bergen County Academies senior from Paramus, won a $25,000 technology scholarship for building an algorithm that studies Alzheimer’s disease but “can also be applied more widely,” he said.
Won, of Ridgefield, also a graduate of Bergen County Academies, a public magnet high school in Hackensack, and now a freshman at Cornell University, won a $25,000 scholarship in science for marine research on how corals can thrive despite rising global temperatures.
Woo, 18, of Englewood Cliffs and a freshman at Yale University, won a $50,000 music scholarship for a multimedia project that “is about rethinking classical music” to find a bridge “with contemporary performance styles to make the art form more accessible and relevant,” she said.
“To be honest, I don’t think anyone expects to win these kinds of things,” said Dharani, who was at open gym for volleyball when the email popped up on his phone. He applied for the award in February, and had forgotten all about it. “It came out sometime in the afternoon. I told my parents, and it was incredibly exciting.”
His Alzheimer’s algorithm will investigate differences between patients with severe and less severe illness and the biological factors influencing them, like sex and body mass. Dharani built it first as a personal project, and “demonstrated its effectiveness in studying Alzheimer’s” with faculty at Weill Cornell Medical College, he said.
Dharani, whose parents moved to the U.S. from India, built most of his algorithm outside school hours. He credited the resources and environment at Bergen County Academies, which includes two or three “research-integrated class periods” every week that are offered as a class or an elective.
“They have a lot of resources and mentorship and support. You get a lot of rigor. You’re challenged course-wise and curriculum-wise. I think that helps you build time management skills and things like that, but also enables you to be part of a community where everyone’s kind of driven and pretty smart…and become a better version of yourself.”
In an interview filled with words like “phenotype” and “disregulation,” the 17-year-old explained his project. “I wanted to study what are the biological mechanisms in the brain or outside the brain that are leading to people developing Alzheimer’s in the first place, and also, what mechanisms are making the manifestations of Alzheimer’s in these patients more and more severe as time goes on.
“I took large biological data sets and used data analysis to figure out what metabolic mechanisms and molecules drive Alzheimer’s,” he said. He picked Alzheimer’s because of the rapid cognitive decline it inflicts, he said.
Won studied the “growth of corals on different calcium subtrates,” through a collaboration between the Academies and Jenkinson’s Aquarium in Point Pleasant. Her research applies to coral restoration efforts.
“I learned that when corals grow on fish bones, they grow a lot more and faster in the same period compared to other materials,” she said. Her interest in climate change grew from visiting a beach in Korea, where she said a lifeguard told “everyone to leave the water, because of jellyfish. I learned later that this was because the water temperature in the sea was pretty high.” Warmer sea waters are linked to proliferating jellyfish.
Won, who wants to become a doctor, said she learned about the award while in Korea over the summer. “I was visiting my grandma in the city of Jangheung in South Korea, in the countryside,” she said. The scholarship took her and her family by surprise, said Won, whose father is a pastor and her mother is a dental assistant.
“My parents were really surprised because they were not expecting anything at all because this is a pretty selective scholarship. They’re like, very very happy for me…it was just a big surprise…I’m really grateful,” she said about the scholarship, which she plans to use to fund medical school after she graduates college.
Woo is working on a classical-to-contemporary music multimedia project to make the art form more accessible and relevant, she said.
“My project is about how music has changed over time and why many classical musicians are still unsure about playing new music ā and what that says about how we view tradition, creativity, and change,” she said. “I wanted to find out why so much of todayās music is left unheard and why many performers feel disconnected from the voices of their own time.”
For 25 years, the Davidson Fellows Scholarship has recognized some of the most remarkable research undertaken by young people in the nation,ā said Davidson, founder of the Davidson Institute, whose projects are “marked by innovation, perseverance and the hundreds of alumni whose work continues to make a lasting difference in their fields and communities.ā
The Davidson Fellows Scholarship has provided more than $10.7 million in scholarship funds to 469 students, the Institute said, and is one of the most prestigious undergraduate scholarships according to U.S. News & World Report. Its scholarships go to students whose work has “the potential to benefit society in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, literature and music,” it said.
