Navya Shah
Biomedical researcher, solution builder, and founder — Naperville, Illinois
Patent-pending inventor
ASHG 2026 presenter
Congressional App Challenge winner
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Biomedical researcher, solution builder, and founder — Naperville, Illinois
Every problem I’ve worked on follows the same pattern: find a system that’s broken, build something that fixes it, and make sure it keeps working without me. A research pipeline that any lab can rerun. A food-rescue app that matches meals to shelters while I’m in class. A volunteer network across nine countries that teaches 30+ classes a week whether I’m online or not. I don’t start projects. I build multipliers.
34,000 GWAS variants no one has ranked. A shelter three miles from surplus food with no way to connect. A rural clinic with no specialist on any continent. I start where infrastructure ends.
Not a report. Not a pitch deck. Working systems: a computational pipeline on AWS GPUs, three apps on the App Store, a 501(c)(3) with Candid Platinum transparency. If it doesn’t ship, it doesn’t count.
Train 30+ volunteer instructors so one person’s class becomes 1,600. Recruit 35 corporate professionals so one teenager’s idea has enterprise talent behind it. Open-source the code so the next researcher doesn’t start from zero. Build it so it scales past me.
Present at ASHG. Report the null result. File the patent. Publish the preprint with open data. Earn the Candid Platinum seal. Get covered by NBC, the Tribune, and NaperToday. If the work is real, let it be checked.
Autoimmune GWAS studies point at ~34,000 candidate credible-set alleles across diseases like MS, rheumatoid arthritis, IBD, type 1 diabetes, lupus, and psoriasis. Most do nothing. At Karmyx Biolabs, my independent computational-genomics lab, I built a pre-registered pipeline — SuSiE fine-mapping, Enformer deep-learning variant scoring, locus-matched null calibration — that ranks candidate regulatory variants at 20+ loci across multiple ancestry groups, run on AWS EC2 GPU instances.
It recovered the 17q gold-standard positive control, and when my initial CTCF insulator hypothesis failed, I reported the null result with open code, because a clean no saves the next researcher months. The work is a preprint on Research Square, open data on Zenodo, an accepted ASHG 2026 poster, and a U.S. provisional patent application.
Before the pipeline, I authored a meta-analytic review, “Somatic Mutations as Biomarkers for Autoimmune Disease,” surveying 15 published cohorts (2,500+ patients) with a focus on TET2 and STAT3 — the question that started everything: can what oncology already knows help autoimmune disease?
The pipeline, the data, and the code are open. Any lab can rerun, extend, or challenge the analysis. That’s how multipliers work.
Every program below admits graduate students and postdocs alongside undergraduates. I applied, was selected, and produced original work using the same tools and standards.
Healthcare technology should be built for the people infrastructure forgets — the patient whose language the system doesn’t speak, the shelter the food system can’t see, the clinic the specialist can’t reach. Each app below started with a problem I watched go unsolved, and each runs without me in the loop. All three are free on the Apple App Store.
In 2021, I taught one English class to one group of students in Guatemala. By 2024, that single class had become a 501(c)(3) delivering free STEM and literacy education to 1,000+ students across 9 countries, with a Rwanda launch in progress. The multiplier was the volunteer model: I recruited and trained 30+ instructors from 8 companies so the classes keep running across multiple time zones whether I’m online or not. I have personally coordinated every single class, prepared the material, trained each new volunteer, managed global partners, and ensured the funding to keep operations going — all while managing high school. This has been my life for the past four years.
The operation is coordinated by a 20+ member core operating team, with 35+ skilled corporate volunteers engaged overall from Walmart, Microsoft, Humana, Morningstar, Costco, and LPL Financial.
EmpowerEats, our food-rescue program, has rescued 15,000+ meals for Chicagoland shelters, including ~150 weekly to Hesed House and 6,000+ to domestic-violence shelters in 2025 — a network built after 60+ restaurant pitches earned the first yes. That first yes was the hardest thing I’ve done. Everything since has been the system I built around it: Bridge 2 Meal handles the matching, the corporate volunteers handle the technology, and a partnership with Illinois State Senator Laura Ellman on the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act handles the policy. In 2026, the foundation hosted Senator Ellman as speaker at our Compassionate Kitchen Awards — our recognition program for partner restaurants. One person pitching restaurants became a system that feeds hundreds of people every week.
I also served as Student Leader on the Naperville Sister Cities Commission, representing youth across 16 City Council commission meetings in 2024.
Across grades 9–12 I completed ~450 hours of patient intake and surgical shadowing spanning three specialties — orthopedic and hand surgery, oral and maxillofacial surgery, and cardiology. I assisted with patient check-in, recorded histories and vital signs, and relayed updates to physicians while supporting the physician assistant in clinic. I spent two weeks in the operating room observing surgical management of osteoarthritis and oral/maxillofacial conditions, and shadowed a cardiology practice through evaluation, diagnostic workup, and outpatient management.
What I studied hardest was never the procedure — it was how physicians walk patients through pain management, treatment options, and shared decisions.
Founder & President · 2025–present
I built a 30+ member research-methods program at Neuqua Valley that takes students from question to defensible finding: framing falsifiable hypotheses, distinguishing exploratory from confirmatory aims, selecting controls and sample strategy, and pre-specifying analysis plans before data collection. The curriculum comes from first-hand practice — literature review and citation discipline, variable isolation, interpreting negative results, and documentation to IJAS/ISAS/JSHS submission standards. I mentor members one-on-one through full competition cycles, and several have advanced to regional and state competitions.
State-certified · 2023–2025
Tutored non-native adult immigrants in English literacy and communication, designing a personalized curriculum for each learner — vocabulary, grammar, reading comprehension, conversational fluency, and job-interview preparation — with culturally responsive teaching.
Grant-Review Committee Member · In partnership with North Central College
A selective two-year program carrying 4 transcripted college credits. Year one: trained in nonprofit management, governance, and grantmaking, served on the grant-review committee funding youth nonprofits, helped approve a $500 community grant, and secured a $750 grant for the Empower Futurewave Foundation. Year two: designing a fundraising campaign. Invited to the KidsMatter Youth Leadership Summit.
Seven-time district winner of the Young Authors Competition, and author of a published young-adult novel, Karma Spirits and the Dark Moth, written at age 10.
Four years of continuous ensemble violin at Neuqua Valley — Concert Orchestra to Symphonic Orchestra to Symphonic Strings — now studying audio engineering and composition through Music Production I–II, with performances at local senior homes. Twelve-plus years of Hindustani classical vocal training, since age 5.
Assistant figure skating coach at Rocket Ice Arena in Bolingbrook since 2024 — demonstrating fundamentals to young children, adapting to each skater’s confidence, and keeping beginners encouraged through falls and first successes.
English, Spanish, Gujarati, and Hindi. The morning an interpreter never arrived for an elderly patient at a clinic where I was shadowing, the distance between her and her care felt one sentence wide — those four languages are why Dictation5x5 handles accents and why iGlobal was built multilingual from day one.
NBC 5 Chicago featured Navya Shah and Empower Futurewave Foundation in their Making a Difference segment, highlighting how her team of 20 student volunteers uses the Bridge 2 Meal app to rescue surplus prepared meals from restaurants and event kitchens in Naperville and deliver them to shelters in real time.
“You don’t have to have a lot of money to do something good for the world.” — Navya Shah
NaperToday covered how Navya Shah built Bridge2Meal to connect Naperville restaurants with surplus prepared food to nearby shelters. The article highlights the app’s four-step process — from flagging surplus food to same-day delivery — and notes that food insecurity has risen more than 50 percent in DuPage, Kane, Kendall and Will counties since 2019.
“Last year we had about 6,000 meals delivered. I think this year we are currently somewhere around 9,000, so total I’d say like 15,000 meals so far.” — Navya Shah
Rep. Lauren Underwood named Navya Shah of Neuqua Valley High School as the winner of the 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’s 14th District. Bridge 2 Meal was recognized among over 4,600 apps submitted by more than 13,800 students nationwide.
Navya Shah was invited to present at the Batavia Public Library on her journey building a nonprofit that addresses both food insecurity and education inequality. The event highlighted how Empower Futurewave provided 6,000 meals to domestic violence and community shelters in 2025, with local restaurants partnering to donate unused fresh food delivered by a team of student volunteers.
The Chicago Tribune profiled Navya Shah, 17-year-old founder of Empower Futurewave Foundation, and the organization’s impact on communities locally and globally. The article highlights how Empower Eats delivers approximately 150 meals every week to Hesed House in Aurora — one of the largest shelters in Illinois — with volunteers and business owners coordinating through the Bridge 2 Meal app.
Abstract accepted for poster presentation at the premier human genetics conference, presenting the Karmyx Biolabs variant-prioritization pipeline across 20+ autoimmune disease loci and multiple ancestry groups.
Science Olympiad, five-plus years — Anatomy & Physiology, Microbe Mission, Disease Detectives, Optics, Material Science. USNCO (Chemistry) and USABO (Biology) participant. IJAS 2× Gold. ISAS Gold. JSHS State Finalist. 2025 Congressional App Challenge winner (IL-14). ASHG 2026 presenter.
I’m a senior at Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville, Illinois. My research asks how genetic variation becomes autoimmune disease; my apps ask how technology can reach the people healthcare forgets; my foundation taught me that the distance between a problem and a fix is usually someone willing to be told no sixty times.
The common thread is building things that outlast the person who started them. A pipeline any lab can rerun. An app that matches meals while its developer is in AP Chemistry. A volunteer network that teaches across time zones it has never visited. I care less about being in the room than about whether the room still works after I leave it.
I’m headed for medicine.