When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon and unraveled one very small piece of the galactic mystery, he said, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” However, my “small step” in unraveling a different mystery started in a very different setting.

“Code Blue! Room 31 North!” Alarms blared as nurses frantically paged one doctor after another. Within minutes, doctors from every direction swarmed into one room only to file out somberly before the crash cart even arrived. Finally, the last doctor came out and was immediately besieged by the patient’s relatives. He apologized, “Lo siento.” The family broke down in inconsolable wails, and my heart crashed. Why does it have to be that happy nine-month-old infant who always wore a smile despite the fact that she had more tubes connected to her than she had blood vessels? Was it just last week when I played with her, keeping her company while her parents worked? Although she had both spina bifida and end-stage cancer, she was a brave little girl. For the first time in my life, I witnessed death happening before my eyes. In my subsequent volunteering at the cancer ward and at the PICU in Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital, I was saddened by similar news: countless kids, many of whom I had just talked to, played games with, or watched TV together, passed away. For weeks, I had nightmares, haunted by those innocent sweet faces. I longed to do something for my young friends; unfortunately, all my compassion and love could not cure their illnesses or alleviate their pain and suffering. Eventually, my despair and helplessness melded into a driving force, catapulting me to take some positive action.

As I began my junior year, I contacted over 400 professors, expressing my desire to learn as much as possible about infants, particularly their thought processes. To my dismay, most never replied, and the ones who did, expressed that while they would be delighted to give me a chance, they simply were not allowed to have high school kids as interns because of insurance policies and liabilities. Fortunately, Dr. Rosanne Kermoian, of the Stanford Neurodevelopmental Laboratory, empathized my passions and shared my emotions, for she too witnessed the death of an infant. The professor soon granted me an internship to work at her laboratory the following summer, allowing me to conduct my research and promising to provide me with any resource I needed.

From June to August, I devoted myself wholeheartedly to my research, often working twelve to thirteen hours per day trying to plan out, conduct, and complete a project that would be worthy of publication. Dr. Kermoian recommended that I think about one aspect of infant behavior that particularly intrigued me. I chose to focus on children’s neurological development and its association with physical motor skills because I had interacted with many babies with motor disabilities, primarily spina bifida. From them, I had also noticed that their impaired motor movements often resulted in weakened spatial-visual performance, for these children would often reach for an object, only to entirely miss the target. Thus, I began an endless study of testing babies, scoring the results, and reading one journal article after another to gain the required knowledge to conduct the project. Many times, frustration set in; it was difficult to work with babies who were only 8.5 months old because they were unable to communicate to me verbally. To test these babies, I designed an algorithm that monitored the simple yet informative non-verbal communication, such as hand jerks, eye movement, hand coupling, or posture changes. The algorithm soon provided me with over 60,000 data points in 265 variables.

After translating all the data into different scales and after conducting multi-variable analyses, I confirmed that there is a general relationship between crawling and visual-spatial capacity and that locomotion directly enhances infants’ visual-spatial intelligence. Locomotion helps them not only to perceive the world three-dimensionally but also to establish a sense of direction and to strengthen hand-eye coordination. However, further studies revealed that Asian babies’ performance contradict our hypothesis. As a Chinese, I was particularly piqued by this ethnic-specific anomaly. Therefore, my professor and I contacted the University of Beijing in order to launch a joint study on the same topic, specifically on Chinese children. Initially, the task proved to be extremely difficult because of language barriers, ethical issues, and time zone differences. However, the data they provided were invaluable. We found that Chinese children are often withheld from crawling either because of the way they are raised or the environment in which they live. Though their performance on spatial tasks is relatively poor in comparison to that of American children at 8.5 months, they eventually develop the same skills through neurological maturation. Although the data on the Chinese babies were hard to interpret, they filled in some of our knowledge gaps to the research project.

Currently, my professor and I have begun our first draft. Though our paper is still far from publication phase, which we anticipate to take three years, I have already entitled our thesis: “Object Retrieval in 8.5 Month Old Infants: a Multi-Cultural Study Documenting the Effects of Locomotion Experience and Maturation on Infant Visual-Spatial Capacity.” Like Neil Armstrong whose exploration shed some light on our understanding of the universe, my research has shed some light on our understanding of the human mind. While I cannot claim that I have made a “giant leap” for mankind, I have certainly made a small step towards achieving my dream of helping children. One day, after many of these small steps, perhaps I can then make that “giant leap” in pediatric neurology.