World changer

EAST COUNTY — Alone in her Duke University dorm room, Brittany Wenger wakes up every hour throughout the night to the sound of her alarm.

The noise — which sounds like a dump truck backing up — awakens the notoriously deep sleeper and tells her to test another breast cancer sample from her computer.

Wenger also runs trials during the day, but she needs the extra time at night.

The more trials Wenger runs, the more statistically significant the results become.

“I pull out one breast cancer sample, run it against the neural network and see how it diagnoses it,” Wenger said. “For the first few minutes, I just run trials and record it. I don’t do major analysis until the morning because I don’t think my brain would be alert enough in the middle of the night for it to be very valid.”

Wenger is a college student not getting enough sleep.

She also is changing the world.

The Out-of-Door Academy graduate was named in December to Time magazine’s annual list of “30 People Under 30 Changing the World.”

“I didn’t expect to make it,” said Wenger, who made the list alongside the founders of Snapchat, WordPress and Instagram and even the actor Michael B. Jordan. “It was shocking when I found out. It is 30 under 30. I am 19.”

Wenger made the list, according to Time, because she won the 2012 Google Science Fair’s Grand Prize for teaching a software network, or an artificial brain, to detect breast cancer.

Her diagnostic process uses a fine needle aspirate to sample cancer cells, and the data go into a computer, rather than a microscope.

The process is considered less invasive and cheaper than the current biopsy procedure, and the project helped Wenger land a full scholarship to Duke.

But to hear Wenger tell it, at home in East County on the last day of her first winter break from college, her dream goes beyond the boundary of a computer and into the laboratory.

The dream has changed over time, but college has made it firmer.

“When I was little I had a new career every week — a singer, a veterinarian, you name it,” Wenger said. “My parents have always been supportive without forcing me to do anything.”

When she was in sixth grade at Nolan Middle School in a class of 30 students, Wenger’s teacher pulled her aside and commended her curiosity, encouraging her to apply it to research.

Wenger began building Web pages that same year.

Today, Wenger is a dual major in computer science and biology and is also interested in courses in genomics, a discipline of genetics.

During waking hours at school, Wenger, a freshman, plays Quidditch — the wizard sport played on brooms as told in the Harry Potter book series.

“My position in Quidditch is a beater,” Wenger said. “It requires the most strategy and the least hand-eye coordination.”

Wenger’s week will also include 15 hours or so of class time and another 15 hours of fun time — in a laboratory.

Wenger’s dream calls for her to spend another eight years in school after undergraduate studies to earn a doctorate of medicine and of philosophy (M.D.-Ph.D.) so she can work as a pediatric oncologist who can also do research.

As a professional, she will spend half her time treating children with cancer and the other half in a lab.

“I was joking with my mother that currently I am a kindergartner in terms of years of school I have left,” Wenger said.

Wenger has extended her breast cancer diagnostic work to leukemia and has plans to tackle ovarian cancer next.

Two hospitals, one in Philadelphia and another in Italy, are beta testing her breast cancer diagnosis procedure.

“I communicate with the hospitals, and they share the results,” Wenger said. “Right now, the hospitals are using my procedure as the second line of defense. Ideally, it will be the first line of defense.”

At home during winter break, when she wasn’t dealing with more age-appropriate crises such as sharing a car with her brother and navigating her parents’ new neighborhood, Wenger was waking up at 4 a.m. to submit a second draft of her breast cancer research to a scientific journal.

Back at Duke, Wenger will continue her nighttime test runs.

When she was in 11th grade, she says she ran 7.6 million trials on breast cancer samples.

Wenger spends her time improving cancer diagnosis because her cousin was diagnosed with the disease when Brittany was in the 10th grade.

She does not seek the spotlight, although it has found her, and it allows her to share her insights.

A week after the Time story ran, the U.S. State Department invited Wenger to speak in Russia at a tech summit.

At the event, from May 13 to May 16, Wenger will speak to children interested in science and inspire them to learn.

Last April, she recorded a broadcast for the state department that was shown around the world.

“When you do something you work quite hard on, it’s amazing to share it with others,” Wenger said.

Contact Josh Siegel at [email protected].