Photo by Erin Nelson.
James Shi, a 2022 graduate of the Alabama School of Fine Arts and neuroscience major in the pre-medicine program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, at the UAB campus.
When recent high school graduate and aspiring neurosurgeon James Shi was deciding on a career, he knew there were certain aspects that he was looking for in his future job: complexity, the opportunity to innovate and, above all, the ability to help people.
His love of math and science and his record of excellence in the Alabama School of Fine Arts’ math-science program led to Shi, a Vestavia Hills resident, being selected as one of two U.S. Presidential Scholars for the class of 2022 for the state of Alabama.
Every year, the White House Commission of Presidential Scholars selects one female student and one male student from each state based on their academic success, school evaluations and transcripts, community service, leadership and artistic and technical excellence.
“I’m very honored,” Shi said.
He said his passion for math and science started at a young age, constantly being surrounded by them since both of his parents were in the medical field.
“I explored my passions more in middle school,” Shi said. “It came to me really early that I really enjoy doing math and science. I think I stopped doing math competitions in ninth grade. I still competed in them in school, but I kind of toned down the time I spent towards it and really started focusing on the science aspect.”
During his junior and senior year of high school, he started taking classes related to medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, specifically organic chemistry and biochemistry, and he job-shadowed health professionals, he said.
On top of founding the Birmingham Branch of the Alliance of Youth Leaders, a national student-led organization, and teaching math classes and coaching middle school math teams at Booker T. Washington K-8 School for MATHCOUNTS competitions, he’s also researching treatments for low-grade gliomas.
“Gliomas are a certain type of brain tumor. They make up around a third of them,” Shi said. “Right now, the issue is once someone is diagnosed with a low-grade glioma, we don’t really know the best way to treat it and then it will, inevitably, become high-grade glioma and the patient will unfortunately die.”
For his senior research project as part of Alabama School of Fine Arts’ math-science program, his goal was to create a research model for low-grade gliomas, so doctors can test specific treatments on it, he said.
“I did a small part in this,” Shi said. “One type of low-grade glioma, called an astrocytoma, has three main mutations that it’s defined by, and I worked with one of these mutations. Essentially, in the lab I determined the best method in which this mutation could be replicated in a model.”
One of the motivations for Shi’s research and interest in neuroscience came from a friend who died from a brain tumor at 13 years old, he said.
Shi will be attending the University of Alabama at Birmingham this fall in their Early Medical School Acceptance Program, which admits 15 students with guaranteed acceptance into UAB’s Heersink School of Medicine. He said he is also continuing his research on low-grade gliomas at the university as well as part of a research lab throughout his undergraduate studies.
He said when he gets to UAB, he hopes to be accepted into their Ph.D. program so he can pursue a doctorate in neuroscience.
“I have to be helping someone in my future job,” Shi said. “I really believe in person-to-person contact, helping another person and changing their life. Being a neurosurgeon, as I’d like to be, I feel like that’d be a great way for me to be able to impact people.”
