Kid Science

You might think that the teenagers who attend the Jisan Research Institute in Pasadena are a group of child prodigies, blessed at birth with uncanny minds and seemingly supernatural intelligence. How else to explain their near-perfect—or perfect—SAT scores and the fact that most have authored scientific papers, even presenting their findings at international conferences?

The reality is that the model students at the Institute are almost ordinary high school kids with a common interest in math and science and the good fortune of attending this exemplary academy.

Of the 33 high school seniors at the JRI—where total enrollment is 53 students—17 are from nearby Arcadia High School. It is primarily a word-of-mouth, after-school program offered during the academic year.

Started by Dr. Sanza Kazadi when he was a graduate student at CalTech, the Institute came about almost by chance, as the young academic began to supplement his meager income by tutoring high school students for their SAT exams.

It wasn’t long before Kazadi realized he could tap the pent-up energy of his bored but bright SAT students to tackle his own need for research assistants. In short order, the graduate student was leading his high school charges to explore the complex problem of “swarm behavior,” a phenomenom that describes the way autonomous agents often collaborate in nature.

In the process his students became actively involved in science—a move that gave many of them a big head start on their own scientific careers. The first of Kazadi’s students was accepted at UC Berkeley in 1998.

The following year, three of his assistants ended up at UCLA, Harvard and Chicago Medical School. Since then, this benign Pied Piper has led teens to MIT, Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon, USC, the University of California, Duke Univeristy, Stanford, and Brown.

However, Kazadi’s goals for the Institute exceed even excellent college placement results. He hopes to revolutionize the way science is taught, particularly at the high school level, by eventually having a chain of institutes all over the country. His ultimate aim is to force schools to abandon “passive” modes of teaching while embracing active, participatory scientific study at the high school level.

In order to do so, the Institute will also have to convince established scientist and graduate students that high school students are up to the challenge of real-world scientific research. One persuasive argument is financial. For example, $40,000 will typically provide one year of funding for a single graduate student, whereas it will support a team of 13 students for two terms at the Institute.

So far, Caltech’s Center for Neuromorphic Engineering and the National Science Foundation have sponsored JRI students.