David is the President and Founder of Radiant Minds, and his mission is to understand and address pressing global issues, including sustainability, migration, and inequality, through the interdisciplinary lens of Classics, Physics, and Philosophy. He is a high school student at St. John’s School in Houston, Texas and has been involved in various activities, including Latin study, philosophy club, physics research, volleyball, Eagle Scout, and the Junior Classical League.

From a young age, David became fascinated by one question: How does the world work? With this curiosity, David began his search for understanding with History. As a 6th grader, he became passionate about Roman History, studying Latin and Roman history and drawing parallels between society today and historical events. David still studies Latin to this day, earning national gold medal awards in the National Latin Exam.

During high school, David began to expand his interest in the drivers of the world to philosophy because it studies how human minds should work, and economics because it studies human behavior in the presence of scarcity. With this new interest, David began reading works of philosophy such as Plato’s The Republic, Camus’s The Stranger, or Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra while self-studying economic principles of supply and demand for competitions like the National Economics Challenge, which he won 3rd place nationally. David became especially interested in migration as an intersection of philosophy and economics through the behavioral drivers of migration. Through this interest, David volunteered with refugee families, working closely with an Afghan family for over 3 years to help them with the transition to American life. David also researched the specific state-to-state migration flow between California and Texas, analyzing social and economic drivers motivating the exodus between the two states. Through his work, David learned that behind every migration statistic is a human story shaped by complex motivations of hope, fear, and opportunity. This insight deepened his belief that understanding economic models and statistics must go hand-in-hand with empathy and ethical reasoning.

David’s interest in how the world works continued to grow through his high school career. When he chose to take AP physics early in his sophomore year, David immediately became interested in the mathematical applications to the inner workings of the universe. David earned the opportunity to work with Professor Huang of the UCLA Nuclear Physics Department on the analysis of data from the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven, New York. This work investigated the possibility of anomalous kaon production in heavy ion collisions, which could hint at possible gaps in the standard model, the current physical understanding of the world. This experience demonstrates David’s deep curiosity towards how the world works through his initiative in pursuing advanced scientific research and his commitment to exploring fundamental questions at the frontier of modern physics.

Through this quest to understand the inner workings of the world, David became a strong interdisciplinary student with broad interests in academic fields such as physics, philosophy, classics, and economics, and social causes such as migration and displacement, environmental sustainability, socioeconomic inequality, public policy, and technology. David became painfully aware of the lack of support for interdisciplinary students like him, so he founded this organization to spread awareness of the interconnectedness of the world and celebrate interdisciplinary interests. David believes that solving the world’s most complex problems in issues of displacement, socioeconomic inequality, environmental sustainability, and technology requires more than just expertise in a single discipline—it demands deep curiosity, empathy grounded in experience, and a willingness to think beyond convention.

Through Radiant Minds, he hopes to empower a new generation of thinkers who recognize interdisciplinary connections and solutions, and who approach the world’s greatest challenges with imagination, creativity, and hope.