Mannat Vikramaditya Jain

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Mannat Vikramaditya Jain is from Garden City, New York, and graduated from Garden City High School as a National Merit Scholar. At Columbia, he plans to major in Materials Science and Engineering. His long-term interests lie in startups and atomically precise manufacturing, and he’s currently exploring quantum chemistry.

Mannat started research in his freshman year of high school, experimenting across a wide range of interests. As a sophomore, Mannat developed an app to translate American Sign Language gestures into speech, earning Third Place Grand Prize at the New York State Science and Engineering Fair, Best in Physics at the Long Island State Science Congress, and Highest Honors at the Long Island State Science Congress. He went on to represent Long Island at the New York State Science Congress.

In his junior year, he used U-Nets to develop a deep learning algorithm to improve fetal lung immaturity detection from fetal ultrasounds. This earned Second Place Grand Prize at the New York State Science and Engineering Fair, Second Place Grand Prize at the Long Island Science and Engineering Fair, and the U.S.A.I.D. International Science Champion Award.

That summer, he competed at the 2024 Society of Critical Care Medicine Datathon as the only high school student on a team of senior clinicians and data scientists. The team won first in the Health Equity and Diversity category, researching racial biases in ICU units by analyzing 53,111 distinct ICU stays across the eICU Collaborative Healthcare Database. Mannat continued working on the project for over a year, collaborating with Dr. Leo Anthony Celi, Clinical Research Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computational Physiology. The team published two abstracts: “Differences in Documentation Practices Across Intensive Care Units in the US: A Cluster Analysis” (co-authored) and “Variation in ICU Nursing Documentation Across Race-Ethnicity Groups and Correlation with Outcomes” (second author). Mannat presented the team’s findings at the 2025 Critical Care Congress conference in Orlando, Florida.

The same year, he joined a research project at Duke University. He worked one-on-one with Dr. David Page, Chair of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, on a project to design novel restriction enzymes for DNA computers. They collaborated with professors at the University of Lodz, Poland, and Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, and co-authored “Computational Design of Bio-molecular System by DNA Computing for Blood-Based Cancer Diagnostic Tool.” Most recently, Mannat earned an NSF travel grant to present the group’s research at DNA31, the world’s largest conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming, in Lyon, France.

Apart from research, Mannat developed a search engine app for Google Classroom that combined assignments, materials, and announcements into a single interface. His app placed first in the Congressional App Challenge, and Mannat was invited to present his project at the Capitol. A flag was flown over the U.S. Capitol in his honor, and the project earned a provisional patent. He also participated in the Columbia Science Honors Program, taking weekly classes at Columbia University for two years while in high school.

Outside of academics, Mannat enjoys playing chess and tennis. He started playing chess at the age of eight and holds a peak USCF rating of 1813. In high school, he launched a program called Chess4Community to teach chess to senior citizens and young children in Garden City. The program impacted over 300 seniors and received recognition from the town Mayor and Board of Trustees, as well as coverage by Newsday. For his community service, he was awarded the Gold President’s Volunteer Service Award across two consecutive years and the New York State Senate’s Youth Leadership Recognition Award. He played tennis as part of his high school’s varsity tennis team.

He loves to read and is currently working through Stripe Press’s complete catalog.