Ahmedabad, Aug 11: Shaurya Patel, a class X student at Adani International School, Ahmedabad, won Gold for the second consecutive year at the Initiative for Research and Innovation in STEM National Fair 2025-26 Cohort 2, India’s platform for school-level scientific research and innovation.
Shaurya Patel’s research aimed at developing a unified, longitudinal metabolic “Health Credit Score” that integrates clinical biomarkers with lifestyle and wellness factors to improve early risk stratification and AI enabled preventive intervention. This year 120 projects by 152 students were evaluated at the IRIS National Fair.
Shaurya Patel’s selection reflects not only individual excellence but also the strength of India’s growing STEM innovation ecosystem nurtured through national platforms such as IRIS. The IRIS National Fair is aligned with major national science initiatives including NCSC, NCSM, NCERT, CBSE Science Exhibition and INSPIRE, ensuring that the best research projects from across the country receive structured mentoring and global exposure.
Shaurya Patel has developed a research framework for a unified Metabolic Health Score. This is a single, interpretable number that consolidates clinical, lifestyle, and diagnostic data to help patients understand their metabolic health trajectory. He worked in collaboration with medical, biostatistics, and digital-health product teams, targeting one of modern healthcare’s most pressing gaps: the fragmented way metabolic risk is currently being communicated to patients.
The research aims to support millions of people living with conditions such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, MASLD, and PCOS who receive their health data across separate test reports, app dashboards and clinical cut-offs – with no single number to gauge their overall metabolic health. Modelled conceptually on a financial credit score, his proposed score consolidates these inputs into one metric that stratifies into low, moderate, and high-risk categories, identifies which health domains contribute most to the patient’s risk, and tracks how that risk shifts over time in response to guided digital intervention.
Shaurya led the full arc of the research – from scoping the clinical question and shortlisting focus disorders, to reviewing scientific literature, preparing outcome summaries, supporting variable selection, and engaging with the data cleaning and quality assurance process alongside biostatistics and product teams. He also developed an understanding of the ethical principles governing the use of anonymised patient data in research.
The project also carries an exploratory oncology dimension. Because metabolic syndrome activates pathways – chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, oxidative stress – that are increasingly associated with cancer predisposition, the score is being designed with the potential to flag patterns linked to cancer risk over time. Data collection from oncology patients remains ongoing, and this component is appropriately framed as preliminary and evolving.
The patient will receive earlier identification of risk before disease becomes established, continuous health monitoring through a single trackable number and the opportunity for personalised digital or clinical intervention while there is still meaningful interval to act.
Having won the Gold at the IRIS in 2025 as well, Shaurya represented India at the prestigious Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair 2025 which was held in Columbus Ohio, USA, in May 2025.
India’s consistent presence at Regeneron ISEF over the years has resulted in multiple international recognitions, underscoring the quality of student-led research being nurtured through the IRIS National Fair. It also underlines India’s representation at the world’s premier school-level science fair, inspiring a new generation of young researchers to pursue science, innovation, and discovery with global impact.