Ben Stone

Ben Stone is a second-year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. His research experience in Boston in Dr. Daniel Muehlschlegel’s lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital as a Summer Premedical Research Internship fellow was a formative experience in his premed journey. He designed and executed a population-scale study to identify genetic risk factors for postoperative atrial fibrillation using the NIH All of Us dataset (>300,000 individuals); he presented the project as a poster and continued to contribute remotely upon returning to BYU. Outside the lab, he shadowed his mentor during cardiac surgeries, including coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) and aortic dissection repair. Weekdays in the lab paired with OR shadowing showed him how translational research informs care in real time and shaped his goal to integrate bioinformatics with clinical practice. At BYU he also worked in the Pickett Lab on computational biology and completed a genetics summer internship at UCLA. As a Fulbright researcher in Estonia, he later developed deep-learning approaches for copy-number variation in biobank data.