How can one drug work as an anesthetic and also as an antidepressant? S., a student at a US boarding school, turned that puzzle about ketamine into a research paper in 2025 and was admitted to Harvard in the early round.
When CRI shares news like this, families almost always ask the same thing first: was this student exceptional from the start? What set S. apart was not a finished résumé. It was a single, consistent line that ran from interest to inquiry, from inquiry to a paper, and from the paper to an intended major.
Curiosity that kept asking why
Brain science, mental health, and the ways drugs shape human behavior and cognition had held S.'s attention since high school. This went well beyond "I want to go to medical school" or "I want to study biology." It was curiosity that asked for reasons:
- Why don't antidepressants take effect right away?
- Why does the same drug act so differently from one person to the next?
- What actually happens in the brain to make emotions change?
The challenge was turning that curiosity into something a college could trust as real evidence of fit for a major. That bridge turned out to be a research paper written with CRI.
One drug, two very different jobs
In 2025, S. joined a CRI research program and worked under Professor Jason Sello of UCSF (University of California, San Francisco), bringing those long-standing interests straight into the project and narrowing them to one question: why does ketamine act as both an anesthetic and an antidepressant? Put more broadly, how can a single drug play entirely different roles in the brain?
That was the moment a personal interest became a research question. The paper worked through the problem in stages:
- the limitations of conventional antidepressants
- why ketamine acts so quickly
- how blocking NMDA receptors changes the brain's neural circuits
The project then widened to ketamine's potential as a treatment for irritability associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). By analyzing the NMDA-receptor mechanism, the paper made a scholarly case for drug repurposing: taking a drug already in use and applying it to a different condition. In a later note, the student described the work as a paper "about the dual repurposing of ketamine." It was pharmacological analysis well past the usual high-school level.
