high-school-research
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Polygence
Polygence is an online research mentorship platform that pairs ambitious high school students one-on-one with PhD-level mentors from institutions like Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Oxford to design and complete an independent research project over roughly 10 sessions. Founded in 2019 by two Stanford PhDs, Janos Perczel and Jin Chow, it turns curiosity into tangible outcomes - published papers, apps, novels, podcasts - and gives students a distinctive credential for college applications. The company now spans a network of 2,000+ mentors across 40+ fields and runs a biannual Symposium of Rising Scholars where students present their work to a global audience.
Janos Perczel
Janos Perczel is a theoretical quantum physicist turned education entrepreneur. After earning a PhD from MIT working on invisibility cloaks and cold-atom quantum systems under Mikhail Lukin at Harvard, he co-founded Polygence in 2019 with Jin Chow. The company pairs high school students with PhD mentors for one-on-one research projects, and now reaches tens of thousands of students worldwide. As CEO he has pushed Polygence into AI, releasing TeachLM, a language model fine-tuned on 100,000 hours of real one-on-one tutoring data.