Dad's MS spurred teen to launch research project

Lev Shaket is an aspiring neurologist with immaculate grades. But his search for help with his research on multiple sclerosis carries a private tone:

His father, Alexander, has MS.

Plenty of well-rounded high school seniors are graduating this month in DeKalb County, but Shaket, a senior at Chamblee Magnet High School, stands out.

It's not only his grades (a 4.4 GPA). He scored 2330 out of a possible 2400 on his latest SAT and spent the past three years doing research in labs at Emory and Georgia State universities.

This fall he's heading to Harvard University. His scholarship includes free tuition.

But all that's secondary to helping his father.

"I just look at it in terms of positive side effects, " he said of his father's illness. "That it launched my career and that it made me try to treat [MS] and cure it."

The Shaket family includes 17-year-old Lev and parents Alexander and Janna. In 1990, they came to the United States from St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), Russia; Lev was 2 years old.

When Lev was an eighth-grader, in 2000, Alexander Shaket was diagnosed with MS. He eventually stopped working at a paper mill.

Immediately after learning of his father's illness, Lev began reading voraciously online about the disease.

Soon he was writing e-mails to neurological researchers at Emory, expressing his wish to do research with them. He left out the detail about his father.

Yue Feng, an Emory professor with a doctorate in cellular biology, took him under her wing, first curious and then impressed by the ambitious 10th-grader. "He'd come in after 4 o'clock and stay as late as possible, " she said.

The scientist remembers one Thanksgiving eve. "He was here so late, the whole place was just him and me. That's how motivated he was, " she said.