From left, Elizabeth, Samuel, Bryan and Noah Shaw are shown in a family photo from Easter. Bryan Shaw is a Mead High School and Washington State University graduate who has gained national attention for his work to develop a smartphone app that can warn parents of a white glow in a childs eye that may signal retinoblastoma. Noah Shaw lost an eye to the rare eye cancer as ababy. (Full-size photo)(All photos)
Bryan Shaw is a chemist, not a software developer. Hes a parent, not adoctor.
But hes receiving national attention for his effort to create a free smartphone app to warn shutterbug parents of a glow in young childrens eyes a white reflection from a cameras flash that could signal a rarecancer.
The iPhone app, called CRADLE, is still under review by Apple. But Shaw, a Mead High School graduate, sees its potential as huge: saving childrens vision in the U.S. and their lives in poor countries, where retinoblastoma is more likely to be identified only after the cancer has spread to theirbrains.
Shaw thinks big, and his project has been the subject of stories by National Public Radio and PopularScience.
But he also thinks broad. A researcher at Baylor University in Texas whose main work centers on protein science and ALS, Shaw delved into software development because he saw a need, but also because, to him, science is a big-picturepursuit.
As a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University, he watched fellow chemists work on robots and flame control not the stuff of a typical chemistrylab.
That sort of gave me courage, Shaw said. You can do this. You just have to find the right people to workwith.
His academic advisers starting at Washington State University, then at University of California, Los Angeles, and finally in the renowned Whitesides Research Group at Harvard were unconventional scientists, he said: They did not respect boundaries. They did work outside their traditionalfields.
As a scholar, Shaw has been unconventional from the start. His grade-point average at Mead:2.9.
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App aims to alert parents to sign of rare eye cancer - Tue, 23 Sep 2014 PST