Jaeyi Song

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Jaeyi Song graduated from the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts as an Edward Hopkins Scholar. During high school, she was the president of the Investment and Chemistry Olympiad Club as well as the captain of the women’s varsity epee fencing team.

Jaeyi is interested in the intersection between science and business, with aspirations to develop a startup. At Columbia, she plans to pursue Industrial Engineering with a potential minor in economics and pursue a PhD post-grad.

Throughout high school, Jaeyi was engaged in a number of projects. In her freshman year, she developed an early-stage lung cancer detection model that attempted to predict metastasis based on the extent of vascular development surrounding a malignant tumor. This project awarded her 1st place in the Massachusetts State Science and Engineering Fair (MSEF), leading her to seek an internship with Dr. Marsha Moses at the Boston Children’s Hospital’s Vascular Biology Program.

At the Moses lab, Jaeyi shadowed projects relating to extracellular vesicles, triple negative breast cancer, and the link between obesity and cancer survivability. Her sophomore year, Jaeyi won the Broadcom Biomedical Research Award and also presented orally at her regional Junior Science and Humanities Symposium (JSHS), qualifying for nationals. She was also selected as a Distinguished Presenter from the Massachusetts Junior Academy of Sciences (MJAS), a conference where top ranked MSEF presenters were invited to present.

Jaeyi additionally worked on an astrophysics modeling project with Dr. Jason D. Eastman at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where she attempted to model the mass and radius of transiting exoplanets while accounting for systematic error. With this model, Jaeyi developed a novel computational methodology, achieving results 3x better than conventional approaches and also finding some of the most precise eccentricities ever measured. Her research was accepted as a poster presenter at the 2024 American Astronomical Society Conference, 2024 International Astronomical Union General Assembly, and 2024 TESS Conference at MIT. Outside her projects, Jaeyi also enjoys learning about topics such as group theory, optimization, and AI/ML.

Furthermore, Jaeyi is committed to advocacy work. After noticing that public school students were underrepresented at science fairs, Jaeyi founded the Cambridge Middle School Science Research Mentoring Program, a free organization that provided weekly science research classes to middle schoolers. In total, Jaeyi raised over $5,000 in grants for her program. Jaeyi also held leadership roles in Governor Healey’s Youth Climate Council and was a team captain at the Prison Book Program, a nonprofit that provides free reading materials to prisoners across the US. For her achievements, Jaeyi was recognized as a Gold Presidential Service Scholar, Red Sox Service Scholar, and MIT Impact Scholar.

In her freetime, Jaeyi enjoys collecting rare film scripts, listening to music, and trying out different varieties of sweet potatoes. Jaeyi is also an avid cellist and modern art enthusiast.