Lamar Rotary Showcases a Young Man with ‘Potential Plus’

The Lamar Rotary hosted a very unique and talented young man during a recent luncheon meeting.  Armaan Gill, an 8^th grade student at Lamar Middle School, was invited to discuss his accomplishments regarding his science fair project that had quite a few in the audience wondering how far this young man may succeed in his future field of endeavors.  When the inevitable question of, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” surfaced, he expressed an interest in applying his current studies into becoming an orthodontist, something his mother, a dentist, is familiar with.

Armaan Gill

Armaan has won an impressive number of awards for his young science skills.  His most recent science fair project concerned bacterial transformations which can make E. coli glow by way of adapting an organic tool to track genetically modified cells.  He explained the process can be used to help track and position and locate cells that have been infected with Alzheimer’s as well as cells that are infected with HIV.  He basically did this with a science kit working at home and at school and with the assistance of two of his middle school teachers.

Some past awards include Grand Champion for Junior High at the South East Regional Science Fair, a nomination to attend the Colorado State Science Fair Project, he won first place in the category of microbiology at the Colorado State Science Fair and with that, he earned a nomination to Broadcom MASTERS, which is a national science fair competition for the top ten percent of science fair projects from 6^th to 8^th grade students in the US.  As you may expect, he is quite adept at using computers and can hold his own on his soccer team.

All this…and he wasn’t supposed to make it.  His mother, Dr. Sonia Grewal from High Plains Community Health Center, also spoke about her older son, saying that he was several months premature when she gave birth to him while living in New York.  “He wasn’t expected to live with an almost zero chance of having use of his senses.”  She told the Rotary gathering, that when he graduates from school, we’re going back to the hospital that helped us and we’re going to meet with those doctors and show them what they did.

By Russ Baldwin