As undergraduates, identical twins Jon and Stan Schor teamed together at Caltech, serving as co-editors of the student newspaper and participating in the same three sports — track, fencing and cross country.
Credit: Roger J. Wyan
As graduate students, they’re both pursuing degrees in M.D./Ph.D. programs at prestigious Bay Area institutions, but they’re forging different paths. Stan is studying virology at Stanford, while Jon is at UC San Francisco, where the budding neuroscientist has turned his interest in technology into a UC Global Food Initiative student fellowship.
Jon is developing a mobile app that takes nutritional facts such as the calorie count of a food item and translates that into an equivalent physical activity such as running or lifting weights. He has been working all summer to make the app more visually appealing and to update the algorithm so it can personalize user information based on gender, age, height and weight. He hopes to launch a version of the app this fall, perhaps by integrating it with an existing app, and is trying to incorporate it with patient tablets at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco.
“Without the fellowship, I wouldn’t have even thought to trudge into the world of app and mobile development,” he said.
Jon still sees his twin brother regularly — either venturing to Palo Alto or receiving a visit in San Francisco to talk shop and hang out. “He has a permanent spot on my futon,” Jon said.