King Alum Receives Prestigious Academic Scholarship

King School is excited to announce that Ben Persily has been awarded the Milton Fisher Scholarship for Innovation and Creativity for his work through King’s Advanced Science Program for Independent Research and Engineering (ASPIRE). His work with ASPIRE led to an internship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Persily graduated from King School in 2023 and is now a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania.

"I was honored to receive the award, as it always feels good being recognized for my hard work," said Persily. "It also helps reassure me that other people recognize the value of the research I do and the potential impacts it can have on people."

Persily's research at Memorial Sloan Kettering sought to optimize prime editing to target “reporter” genes and ameliorate genetic disorders in pluripotent stem cells. He attempted to correct the leading cause of cystic fibrosis (a mutation in the Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Conductance Regulator gene), as well as using the SOX2 gene to optimize the prime editing system.

King’s ASPIRE course focuses on math and science research techniques, providing methods to help students further understand how research is conducted. In conjunction with the class, students intern at a National Institutes of Health-funded research laboratory, the most distinguished, where they get hands-on experience in the field of modern scientific research.

Victoria Schulman, Director of Science Research at King, noted the importance of Persily's work.

“The novel innovation here is that this approach to correcting congenital diseases can be used to address numerous genetically influenced diseases,” she said. “His creative new approach that rivals the Nobel Prize-winning CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system has applications far beyond the single disease he studied.”

Persily, who is currently enrolled in the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management at the University of Pennsylvania, was one of nine recipients of the 2023 award, beating out thousands of applications nationwide. He is the second King student to receive this impressive recognition, following John Russell, who also received the award for his work in ASPIRE.

The ASPIRE program is supported by the Advanced Mathematics and Science Study Program endowed fund established in 2018 by Margharet, Frank, Bea, and William Nash to support select students with demonstrated ability and interest in achieving true excellence within science, technology, engineering and/or mathematics in global competition preparation, and/or laboratory research experiences.

"King, and especially ASPIRE, gave me the tools to begin conducting research, which I've started at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia," said Persily. "Additionally, the leadership and teaching roles I took up at King have helped train skills that I can apply in college. For example, after leading the math help center for three years at King, I became a mentor for a high school math class, and now am in charge of all of the mentors at Penn going to high schools in West Philadelphia."

King School is an independent day school in Stamford, CT, educating students in PreK through Grade 12. Students at King engage in an immersive and innovative curriculum that is anchored in an inquiry-based pedagogy that nurtures curiosity, intellectual growth, and character development.