When you love learning as a tot, you can change the world as a teen

Imagine you’re babysitting a 7-year-old who’s prattling on about cloud formations while showing you a stair piano she engineered herself:

Would you be impressed — and maybe a little terrified?

Well, now you know how Clara Aboel-Nil’s babysitter felt.

Fast-forward to today

Clara is a 16-year-old junior at AlphaX, and credits her curiosity to her father, who had her delivering a presentation on a new topic every month, starting at age five. 

“It’s something I recommend for every parent, because it definitely made me love learning more,” says Clara.

From an early age, Clara’s learning wasn’t confined to school hours. 

That’s why she had no qualms about spending her summers at the University of Texas, Cambridge, and Oxford taking high-level courses on health and genetics (no biggie).

“I saw it as a time to learn what I liked and didn’t like,” says Clara. “I don’t really like sitting in a lab and researching plant cells that much.”

Finding her passion

Learning what she didn’t enjoy helped Clara pivot away from the lab and into personalized medicine, an exciting new field that uses DNA to help people live their healthiest lives.

“I realized that our genes are actually informing a lot in our lives,” says Clara.

Everything from…

• How our bodies respond to caffeine

• How we grow muscle

• How cancer cells develop in our bodies

… is informed by our genetic code.

DNA can help people live healthier lives— but only if they know how to decipher it.

So, Clara set out to help people do just that.

Choosing her project

Turns out, revolutionizing the way people think about their health isn’t easy.

Clara tried out a few nonstarter ideas, like:

• Writing a newsletter

• Starting a traveling medical clinic

• Opening her own health coaching practice 

But none of these projects hit the mark.

Then, Clara’s uncle passed away from brain cancer. 

“It made me understand that our time on this earth is finite, so I need to be doing something that is helping as many people as I can,” says Clara. 

That’s when she decided to build an AI chatbot — a personalized health coach that anyone can access, 24/7.

“If I can help people live healthier and longer lives through a chatbot, then that’s what I’m destined to do,” says Clara. 

Figuring out how to make it work

There was just one glaring problem: Clara didn’t have any experience in AI or coding.

But she did have a healthy supply of grit that would power her through hours of trial and error.

“Sometimes I’ll try something, and it won’t be the answer I was looking for, but it’ll be an answer that’s better than I wanted it to be,” says Clara.

Like the time that Clara was messing around with her prompt, and ended up with a detailed, step-by-step health plan:

But don’t think that the AI is making it easy on Clara. 

ChatGPT has been known to hallucinate facts, so Clara has had to become an expert in order to verify that her chatbot is giving accurate advice.

In other words, she’s had to become more knowledgeable than the AI. 

What’s next

While Clara’s getting her chatbot ready for beta testing, she’s turning her attention to another important problem:

You can’t change the world if people don’t know about it.

That’s why Clara’s working hard to build an audience on her Twitter(X) account. Give her a follow to stay in the loop on Clara’s journey (and be the first to find out when her app is released!).