CdM eighth-grader’s curiosity leads to big opportunity
Corona del Mar Middle School eighth-grader Maxwell Tran has always had a passion for learning.
When he was in first grade, he was interested in spiders, so he found every morsel of information that he could about the arachnids.
“In general, he’s a very curious person,” said Maxwell’s mother, Uyen Nguyen-Tang. “When he finds something that he’s interested in, he has this dedication to it that I feel is amazing. He’s still 13, so obviously we still want him to be a kid and play with his friends and everything like that. But I’m always in awe when he finds something interesting and puts a lot of work and effort into it.”
His seventh-grade social studies teacher at CdM last school year, Todd Eversgerd, told the class in January that he would have to miss a day of school. He needed to be there for his daughter, Marina High’s Mika Ikemori, as she received a Vagus Nerve Stimulator (VNS) implant to help her battle seizures.
Ikemori is a standout girls’ tennis player bound for UC Davis who recently reached the CIF Southern Section Individuals singles title match for the second straight year. The part of the equation that interested Maxwell, though, was the VNS implant itself.
“The procedure is really simple, it takes 45 minutes to an hour,” he said. “I thought it was interesting that a short procedure to put in a small device could stop a seizure so easily. That’s why it really piqued my interest.”
Maxwell’s father, Dr. Thanh Tran, is an anesthesiologist at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. He handled that part of Ikemori’s procedure.
Meanwhile, Maxwell went home and started watching the first of 50 YouTube videos on VNS implants, rating each one as he went through them.
He submitted a 3,000-character research paper to the Western Medical Research Conference in September, and it paid off. Not only was Maxwell’s abstract accepted, but he has been invited to speak at a WMRC event in Carmel on Jan. 22.
It will be part of a fun weekend for Maxwell, who turns 14 the day before he makes his 10-minute PowerPoint presentation. His mom is a pediatrician at CHOC, and one of her co-workers, Dr. Behnoosh Afghani, has worked as Maxwell’s mentor on the project.
While the thought of a presentation to medical school students does bring nerves — Maxwell has been dealing with a speech impediment since kindergarten — he is confident it will go well.
“I have to talk to people that are way older than me,” he said. “But with a lot of practice and stuff, then it should go smoothly.”
Practice makes perfect, or at least better. Maxwell knows this because of his stutter but also in activities like running for the cross-country team at CdM. He’s also on the yearbook staff.
At the end of the school year last spring, Eversgerd picked Maxwell as his recipient for the CdM Pride award.
“I was expecting, because of his stutter, to have this kid that was really reserved and shy, didn’t really want to participate,” Eversgerd said. “But it was the complete opposite. He would volunteer to share out, answer questions. Even times where he would struggle, just stammer for a good five or 10 seconds, he never let it stop what he wanted to convey verbally. He would just power through, which is kind of unusual for a 12-year-old in seventh grade, especially the social stigma that can come along with that. He never let it get in his way.”
What Eversgerd didn’t realize was all of the research that Maxwell was doing on the VNS procedure. Maxwell never told his favorite teacher until his research was accepted last month. On the day before Thanksgiving, he sent Eversgerd an email with the good news.
“The reason why [I didn’t tell him earlier] was that I didn’t think my paper would be accepted,” Maxwell said. “I’m so young. I was just going to do it for the experience.”
Eversgerd couldn’t be more proud of his former student.
“People can benefit from the information that he’s working on to convey with this abstract, which is also cool,” he said. “It’s not just a Max story, it’s that others can benefit from it as well, as far as garnering information about VNS.”
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