The world of academia is about to welcome the youngest scientific researcher into cancer in Britain, if not further afield.
Just out of school, 17-year-old “Young Einstein” Luthais McCash has a claim to being the youngest person to have lectured on a paper in front of an international conference.
He said: “As far as I’m aware, we’ve asked other professors in the UK and I’m the youngest mathematical biologist in the world.”
The Forfar teenager has been accepted for a paid internship with Dundee University in June, at its world-class life sciences institute.
For six weeks he will study and collaborate with Tim Newman, professor of biophysics and Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance research professor of systems biology.
Despite having mainly studied maths and the black and white world of infallible proofs, Luthais has moved into the world of cancer analysis.
He said: “My grandmother passed away from cancer two years ago and I’ve been very interested in doing what I can, including donating to fundraisers at school, ever since. Then I thought I could work with modelling cancers and maybe do something to help in another way.”
Mathematical biology, in simple terms, is the application and discovery of mathematical equations which can replicate biological processes.
Luthais attended the Young Researchers in Mathematics Conference from April 2 to 4 after penning a paper, which he is hoping to get published, on the back of a two-week work placement at Dundee University’s maths department.
Working alongside PhD students, he was inspired to research cancer and compiled Cancer Tumour Growth Described Using the Predator Prey Model, which he presented at the annual conference in Bristol.
Luthais, a former pupil of Langlands Primary School, worked mainly with PhD student Mark Sturrock to compile his paper. It demonstrates the relationship cancer has with the human body.
“My research will look at the walks in cancer progression based on certain enzymes being activated and deactivated, the analysis of regulatory gene networks, by means of mean field analysis, to give a better understanding of cancer dynamics,” Luthais said. “In that, I’ll be working very closely with Professor Newman.
“I don’t know where I’ll go from there because it depends on funding, but I’ve received an email from someone in Edinburgh (postgraduate researcher James-Michael Leahy) who works with stochastic analysis for differential equations.
“We were maybe looking on doing something together.”
He has also received correspondence from an expert at York University, Professor Reidun Twarock of York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis, who said she was keen to review any of his work.
Following a placement at St Andrews University in December 2010, Luthais completed his first paper, which was based on his interest in organic chemistry.
Professor Newman said: “I often have people coming in to work with me over the summer, but they are postgraduates or degree students. It piqued my interest to have someone so young come in, who had just finished secondary school.
“Luthais is a very extraordinary young man and very unusual in the amount of ambition he has. I have a project lined up for him about feedback in gene regulation.
“He has a very broad perspective of science for one so young he gets it.”