Erin Smith (FacePrint inventor)

The European Patent Office’s release of May 2022 states that she was born in Chicago, United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, and grew up in Kansas. IN Kansas City magazine and KCUR describe her as a native of Lenexa, Kansas.⁠[1][2][3]

The ages printed by the sources are: 17 in KCUR’s article of June 2017, 18 in Startland News in August 2018, 19 in Becker’s Hospital Review in June 2019, and 22 in the European Patent Office’s releases of May and June 2022.⁠[4][5][6][1][7]

BioNexus KC’s article of 2017 gives her mother’s name as JoAnne Huber; when she was young her mother checked science books out of the library and the two of them experimented in the kitchen. In an interview published in 2021 she said that she was raised by her mother, who has no formal scientific background and works as an accountant and financial advisor; the two of them turned a corner of the kitchen into a makeshift laboratory and made rock candy by crystallizing sugar, and she kept a large rock collection and studied geology.⁠[8][2][9]

In the same interview she said that she is one of five children, with two older sisters and two younger brothers, and that when they were children their mother had them help build the real household budget with Monopoly money.⁠[2]

In 2016 the student newspaper of Shawnee Mission West High School quoted the recollection of Brenda Bott, the school’s biotechnology teacher: in fourth grade she was already following her older sister Megan to every science competition and sitting in the audience, and, Bott said, she asked simple science questions then, which later evolved into higher-level, abstract thinking and questions that are not easily answered.⁠[10]

The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s researcher biography states that she has kept a notebook since childhood and that this led to her interest in research. The European Patent Office’s release states that she began lab work at the University of Kansas Medical Center at the age of 10 and competed in science fairs; the speaker biography of London Tech Week 2022 states that she worked in her first lab at fourteen.⁠[11][1][12]

She attended Shawnee Mission West High School in Kansas and was in the Shawnee Mission School District’s Biotechnology Signature Program throughout high school.⁠[13][4]

The sources date the start of the research differently. BioNexus KC states that she began the Parkinson’s research in 2015; the Parkinson’s Foundation podcast and IN Kansas City place it in her sophomore year of high school; the school’s student newspaper quoted her in October 2016 as saying that she had watched the video a year earlier; KCUR wrote in June 2017 that FacePrint had started out as a science fair project and quoted her as saying that she first had the idea about a year and a half earlier, and wrote in November 2018 that she spent most of her junior year designing the app; the European Patent Office states that she noticed the phenomenon at 16 and developed an early detection tool in 2016.⁠[8][14][2][10][4][3][7]

By her own account the starting point was a video by The Michael J. Fox Foundation, in which she noticed that Michael J. Fox and other people with Parkinson’s disease came across as emotionally distant when they laughed or smiled; she paired this observation with inspiration from the American television series Lie to Me, which she had watched as a child and which uses the Facial Action Coding System, and wondered whether the same system could have applications in health care. Local caregivers and clinicians said to her that they had seen similar changes in loved ones years before diagnosis, and her reading of research papers showed that the part of the brain where people with Parkinson’s first experience changes is also the part responsible for spontaneous facial expressions.⁠[4][3][15][14]

KCUR wrote that she had never coded before and checked coding books out of the library and locked herself in her basement to teach herself to code; the European Patent Office’s release states that she locked herself in her basement to learn to code with the help of books and online courses; she said that once she began working with local Parkinson’s patients, it was the human interactions that propelled the project forward.⁠[4][1]

BioNexus KC states that she first worked with 12 patients at a local Parkinson’s community, whose caregivers said they had noticed similar facial changes before diagnosis, and then ran an online study using Affectiva’s software. IN Kansas City states that over spring break she visited people with Parkinson’s and healthy control subjects, recording their responses to video clips and their attempts to mirror expressions.⁠[8][2]

The school’s student newspaper wrote in October 2016 that she recorded the faces of people with and without Parkinson’s as they watched Super Bowl commercials and that the software broke their responses down into millisecond-level measurements of the intensity of facial muscle contractions; the biomarkers she identified included a “masked face,” with reduced overall facial muscle movement, and a muscle above the eyebrow that did not contract in the Parkinson’s subjects. The paper also wrote that after watching a TED talk she contacted the speaker, whose company had come out of the MIT Media Lab, and used that company’s facial recognition software and machine learning algorithms; her advice to fellow students was to start right away and to contact people for help.⁠[10]

BioNexus KC lists her mentors as Brenda Bott, teacher and coordinator of the biotechnology department at Shawnee Mission West High School; Doug McNair, president at Cerner Math Inc; Sally Williams, a consultant at the UMKC Small Business and Technology Development Center; and Jerry Wyckoff, a professor of evolutionary biology at UMKC; the article adds that she connected with BioKansas, Science Pioneers and the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute. Startland News wrote in 2018 that she had worked with the UMKC Small Business & Technology Development Center for two years and that Sally Williams helped connect her with a pro bono patent attorney and taught her about pitch decks and business plans.⁠[8][5]

BioNexus KC states that she was the 2016 winner of the Kansas BioGENEius Challenge, which was co-sponsored by the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute and administered by BioKansas, and that she was the first winner of the BioGENEius GenePool Competition, held at the 2016 BIO International Convention in San Francisco.⁠[8]

In September 2016 she won $10,000 at the #BuiltByGirls Future Founders competition in San Francisco to continue her research. The school’s student newspaper wrote that she had recently won the competition and described it as an annual pitch competition held at Twitter headquarters, judged by high school girls who had held summer internships in New York City and by venture capitalists and professionals from Silicon Valley. KCUR wrote that she had also visited the headquarters of Twitter and Google.⁠[4][10][8]

When the school’s student newspaper wrote about her in October 2016 she was a junior and had been working on the software and algorithms for about a year; FacePrint was then a website, with a mobile app planned for later. She is quoted in the article as saying: “There is no better feeling than knowing you are creating technology that has the potential to save lives.”⁠[10]

In March 2017 the school’s student newspaper wrote that she had been accepted to a summer research program (which the article calls the “Research Summer Institute”) and would probably be mentored by a professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry; she was spending upwards of 10 to 20 hours a week on her research and studies, was interested in wearable devices such as the Fitbit, hoped to create something like a “FitBit for emotions,” and said she wanted to be a social entrepreneur. KCUR wrote in June of that year that her research had earned her an invitation to the Research Science Institute summer program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as one of 50 students nationally.⁠[16][4]

BioNexus KC states that several awards in 2017 (a Kansas BioGENEius Challenge award, the First Award, and the Intel ISEF Best of Category Award for behavioral and social sciences at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles) led to her participation in that year’s BioGENEius Challenge at the BIO International Convention in San Diego; the article then gives the title of her presentation as “A Novel, Telemedicine Diagnostic Tool for Parkinson’s Disease: The Use of Digital Action Unit Biomarkers Generated by Spontaneous and Posed Facial Expressions,” and states that she was named grand prize winner of the 2017 International BioGENEius Challenge for her creation of FacePrint. The article describes her as an 11th-grade student.⁠[8]

On June 13, 2017, she was interviewed by host Steve Kraske on KCUR’s program Up To Date; the program page and the article of the following day describe her as a 17-year-old senior at Shawnee Mission West High School and the article links to a page for taking part in the study.⁠[17][4]

KCUR’s article describes the method at that time: FacePrint used 33 facial tracker points linked to facial muscle movements to look for markers of Parkinson’s; participants first watched five Super Bowl ads chosen to elicit spontaneous expressions and she then took a photo of them emulating three universal emojis to capture posed expressions. The article states that FacePrint was not yet available to the public and had reached 88 percent accuracy, which she said was comparable to current diagnostic methods, and that she believed more data and long-term studies could raise the accuracy into the nineties.⁠[4]

She is quoted in the article as hoping that FacePrint could diagnose Parkinson’s years earlier than current methods: “If we can tap into this critical time period, then we’ll be able to test and develop novel therapeutics.” She also wanted to extend the approach to conditions including post-traumatic stress disorder, narcolepsy and supranuclear palsy, and imagined turning Facebook or SnapchatSnapchatA visual messaging and social app developed by Snap Inc., launched in 2011, with photo and video messaging, Stories, augmented-reality Lenses, Snap Map and Spotlight.Open the full entry into a kind of health care screening tool.⁠[4][8]

BioNexus KC states that through The Michael J. Fox Foundation she expanded her study pool to 265 people nationwide, both with and without Parkinson’s. In an article she wrote in 2018 she said that she had launched a study in partnership with The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s Trial Finder to expand her research nationally. KCUR wrote that The Michael J. Fox Foundation had recognized her work.⁠[8][15][4][18]

KCUR wrote that she founded KC STEMinists, a program that teaches middle and high school girls to code, in which participants worked up app ideas in small groups. The Davidson Institute for Talent Development’s release describes her as a co-founder of Kansas City STEMinists, a coding program teaching middle and high school girls to apply computer science and entrepreneurship to global issues; the Parkinson’s Foundation podcast page also calls her the co-founder of KC STEMinists, which it says teaches middle and high school students to use computer science to address societal issues.⁠[4][13][14]

BioNexus KC’s article adds that she presented at the 2017 Maker Faire at Union Station, was working with Jeremy Wolfe (the article calls his laboratory the Harvard Visual Attention Lab and places it at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), was scheduled to compete in the China Adolescent Science and Technology Innovation Contest in August, and planned a larger study that summer for patients with other neurological diseases. In her 2021 interview she said that she had traveled to China for its national science fair.⁠[8][2]

In that article Wayne Carter, president and chief executive of the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute, called her “a perfect example of the type of student and entrepreneur we want to develop in our region.” She described her technology there as a “modern spin on diagnostics.”⁠[8]

On March 26, 2018, the website of the International Essential Tremor Foundation published an article under her byline, which describes her as a senior at Shawnee Mission West High School in Overland Park, Kansas. She wrote that after developing FacePrint she noticed distinct differences in the facial movements of patients with other neurological diseases and proposed using facial behavioral biomarkers to distinguish Parkinson’s disease from essential tremor non-invasively; in the article she wrote: “I firmly believe that change occurs on an individual level.”⁠[15]

On March 27, 2018, the Parkinson’s Foundation released episode 25 of its podcast Substantial Matters: Life and Science of Parkinson’s, in which host Dan Keller interviewed her. She said on the program that she had worked with 265 participants, including people with Parkinson’s and healthy controls, with accuracy of almost 88 percent, sensitivity of about 87 percent and specificity of about 91 percent; that data collection was entirely remote, through a website that walks participants through a questionnaire and the data collection; and that she was comparing Parkinson’s with essential tremor and making a point of including women and people of all races.⁠[14]

She said on the program that she had filed a provisional patent application the summer before last and then, during the past school year, a full utility patent application; that she had recently been accepted to Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry and was interested in going there; and that she was interested in the intersection of computer science, neuroscience and personalized medicine. The episode page lists prizes from the National Center for Women and Technology, the International BioGENEius Challenge and Google, as well as first prize in the Twitter #BUILTBYGIRLS Challenge and top awards at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, and states that her work had been covered by ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry, Fortune and Seventeen Magazine.⁠[14]

The Linda Hall Library states that she competed in the 2018 Greater Kansas City Science and Engineering Fair, where she received the library’s Joseph C. Shipman Award, which is named after the library’s first director and is given each year to a student whose scientific writing is shown in a paper or project at the fair.⁠[19]

The We Are Family Foundation lists her among its 2018 Global Teen Leaders; the page gives her age as 18 and states that her research was presented and awarded at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium and the International BioGENEius Challenge, and that FacePrint had been featured on NPR’s Up to Date and in Fortune, Forbes and Seventeen Magazine.⁠[18]

Startland News describes her as a 2018 graduate of the Shawnee Mission School District.⁠[5][3]

On June 22, 2018, the Thiel Foundation announced the 2018 class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry; she is the seventh entry on the list, which gives her hometown as Lenexa, Kansas, and, under the label “Health IT,” states that she founded FacePrint, an AI tool to diagnose and monitor Parkinson’s disease and commonly misidentified neurological disorders using video technology and early-stage facial muscle indicators.⁠[20]

Startland News wrote in August 2018 that the two-year, $100,000 Thiel Fellowship, started by PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry co-founder Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry, would begin that fall and offered funding, mentorship and business connections, and that she was one of 20 winners in 2018; the article opens with the words “Stanford University will have to wait,” and states that she planned to put off starting college to take up the fellowship and to stay connected to Sally Williams and the UMKC Small Business & Technology Development Center.⁠[5][20][3][7]

She is quoted in that article as saying: “Ultimately, I hope to leverage the resources from both opportunities to transform the face of Parkinson’s disease diagnosis and treatment.” Her advice to other entrepreneurs was to seek as much advice and criticism as possible as early as possible and to build a “challenge network” of people who question one’s ideas.⁠[5]

Silicon Prairie News wrote on August 30, 2018, that she, at 18, had not started college with her peers that month; she said she was drawn to technology, and to artificial intelligence in particular, because it can be used to “create social good and solve the most pressing social issues.” The article states that the technology had so far been used in two studies, both more crowdsourced in nature, that clinical trials were the next step, which she expected in the coming winter or early 2019, and that as a Thiel Fellow she would work on product and technology development.⁠[21]

KSHB wrote in December 2018 that with the fellowship she was working on the app in CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, work that would include starting clinical trials, and that she intended to attend Stanford University after completing the fellowship. The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s researcher biography gives her location as San Francisco, California.⁠[22][11]

In a release dated September 19, 2018, the Davidson Institute for Talent Development announced that she, a resident of Lenexa, Kansas, had won a $25,000 Davidson Fellows Scholarship, as one of 20 students nationwide to receive the honor; the full title of the winning project is “FacePrint: A Diagnostic and Monitoring Tool for Parkinson’s Disease Using Dynamic Video Footage Tracking and Digital Action Unit Biomarkers Generated by Spontaneous and Posed Facial Expressions.” The release states that FacePrint requires only a computer and a webcam and that the 2018 Davidson Fellows would be honored at a reception in Washington, D.C., on September 28. The 2018 list on the Davidson Institute’s website places her, aged 18 and from Lenexa, Kansas, among the $25,000 scholarship recipients in the Technology category.⁠[13][5][23]

The release adds that she had taken part in the International Swiss Talent Forum, had spoken at the Emotion Artificial Intelligence Summit at the MIT Media Lab, would study computer science at Stanford University in the fall and hoped to pursue an M.D.-Ph.D.; she called Stanford University “a school that perfectly combines my interests of neuroscience and computer science.” In her 2021 interview she said that she had been invited to Switzerland to meet students from around the world and imagine the future of cities.⁠[13][2]

On November 13, 2018, Becker’s Hospital Review published the names on Forbes’ 2019 30 Under 30 healthcare list, on which she is the 27th entry, given as “Erin Smith, 18 — founder of FacePrint.” KCUR wrote on November 23 that she was the youngest person in a decade to make the list; KSHB and IN Kansas City describe her as the youngest person named to that list for 2019.⁠[24][3][22][2]

In the same article KCUR wrote that she had been working with The Michael J. Fox Foundation and hoped to begin clinical trials soon. KSHB wrote that FacePrint is a series of tests in which patients watch video clips or copy facial expressions while a computer webcam records their faces, after which her method uses facial recognition software to analyze the footage and find distinctive patterns of facial muscle movement, and that she started the app in her high school biotechnology class.⁠[3][22]

The European Patent Office’s releases state that she founded the start-up FacePrint in 2019 and that FacePrint was named WIRED Health Startup of the Year in 2019; the May release adds that she took on contractors to further develop the computer vision algorithms and web app. IN Kansas City wrote that the company, which she founded before her 21st birthday, was named the Top Health Startup of 2019 by Wired magazine.⁠[1][7][2][25]

In 2019 The Michael J. Fox Foundation funded a research grant titled “Tool to Identify Parkinson’s Disease Using Digital Facial Expression Biomarkers”; the grant page lists the researchers as Kathleen Lombard Poston, of Stanford, and Erin Smith, of San Francisco. The page states that a “masked face” appears in early-stage Parkinson’s, sometimes years before diagnosis, and that the study would guide participants to produce spontaneous and posed expressions and analyze whether these can detect Parkinson’s, differentiate atypical parkinsonism and predict severity and progression; if the results were promising, a larger longitudinal study would follow.⁠[26][11]

The European Patent Office’s release of May 2022 states that a large-scale clinical trial at Stanford Medical School supported by The Michael J. Fox Foundation enabled her to create an app that automates the process for remote users and to expand the dataset to include more gender and racial diversity; the release of June 2022 states that she created the app after her results were confirmed through that trial. Both releases state that the app predicts Parkinson’s with around 95 percent accuracy and other, misidentified neural disorders with 93 percent accuracy, and that changes in facial expression can occur up to a decade before the loss of motor function.⁠[7][1][27]

Becker’s Hospital Review wrote on June 14, 2019, that FacePrint was a health technology startup developing a web- and smartphone-based system that uses a five-minute facial expressions test, compatible with any device that has a camera, to identify and monitor signs of Parkinson’s disease, and that the test can be taken at a physician’s office or at home; the system analyzes micro-expressions, tiny movements of the facial muscles that happen too quickly for most people to observe. The article states that FacePrint had piloted two studies with The Michael J. Fox Foundation and that in her early research she had used an off-the-shelf facial recognition software package to show the differences between people with and without Parkinson’s.⁠[6]

The article relays what she said to Wired: that FacePrint could be integrated with social media platforms but that this would need to be done in an ethical way; it states that Michael J. Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at 29 and quotes her as saying that going back through his films makes it possible to create “a timeline of when these facial differences started to occur.”⁠[6]

The European Patent Office’s releases state that she began studying artificial intelligence and neuroscience at Stanford University in 2019. IN Kansas City wrote in January 2021 that she was studying Symbolic Systems at Stanford University, a program that combines computer science and neuroscience.⁠[1][7][2][27]

The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s researcher biography states that she was named to the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30, is a Thiel Fellow and would begin studies in neuroscience and computer science at Stanford University after the fellowship; it describes her as focused on the early detection and prevention of neurological and psychological disorders and on redesigning health care. The biography on the website of the National Academy of Future Physicians and Medical Scientists describes her as a freshman at Stanford University whose goal is to build the future of neurological and mental health care.⁠[11][28]

On January 1, 2021, IN Kansas City published an interview with her by Cindy Hoedel, conducted by phone while she was in Palo Alto, where, the introduction states, she was living while studying at Stanford University; in the interview she said that she loved living in California. She said that she was in close contact with researchers who use differences in facial expression to study stroke and autism, and that she thought Covid had accelerated a shift toward telemedicine that was already under way.⁠[2]

Her profile page at the Global Brain Health Institute lists her as an Atlantic Fellow of the 2021 cohort at the University of California, San Francisco, describes her as a creative technologist and gives her nationality as American. The institute’s homepage states that it is based at the University of California, San Francisco, and Trinity College Dublin, that it is dedicated to protecting the world’s aging populations from threats to brain health, and that its program is one of seven global, interconnected Atlantic Fellows programs.⁠[25][29]

The page describes her as a technologist and brain health executive focused on building the future of brain health and as the founder of FacePrint; it states that she sits on the steering committee of the Neuroscience-inspired Policy Initiative of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and is the Director at the PRODEO Institute, and that she is a student at Stanford University focused on neuroscience and computer science. The honors it lists are Forbes 30 under 30, AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador, Thiel Fellow, WIRED Health Startup of the Year and Davidson Fellow.⁠[25]

The page states that in her view dementia calls for multidisciplinary teams rather than siloed approaches, and that as an Atlantic Fellow she aims to develop technologies for precision-medicine dementia care and new approaches that address the social, economic, political, scientific and technological aspects of care.⁠[25]

The “Featured Publications” section of the page lists the journal articles “Investing in Late-Life Brain Capital” (May 23, 2022), “Open innovation: the key to advancing brain health” (July 29, 2022), “Navigating the multiple dimensions of the creativity-mental disorder link: a Convergence Mental Health perspective” (November 16, 2023) and “Empathy as a crucial skill in disrupting disparities in global brain health” (January 1, 2024), and the blog posts “Brain Capital Continues to Advance” (September 7, 2022) and “Exploring How Our Brains Shape Our Values” (April 29, 2024).⁠[25]

The European Patent Office’s releases of May and June 2022 state that she was then on a gap year, working at the University of California’s Global Brain Health Institute.⁠[1][7]

On May 24, 2022, the European Patent Office announced in Munich that she had been shortlisted for the inaugural Young Inventors Prize as one of three finalists. The prize is open to innovators aged 30 or under whose work contributes to the United NationsUnited NationsThe United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 under the Charter of the United Nations. It has 193 Member States, and its headquarters are in New York City.Open the full entry Sustainable Development Goals, and finalists do not need a granted European patent; the prize money is EUR 20,000 for first place, EUR 10,000 for second and EUR 5,000 for third, and the result was to be announced on June 21 at the virtual ceremony of the European Inventor Award.⁠[1]

The release calls her a “natural born scientist,” states that she was drawn to the human brain and read the research behind the television series Lie to Me, and recounts that with the help of Parkinson’s support groups she designed a study, recording video of people with and without the disease and then using facial recognition software and a computer vision algorithm to find the differences between the two groups. António Campinos, president of the European Patent Office, said in the release that her insight, innovative drive and application of new technologies have the potential to move early detection forward.⁠[1]

She is quoted in the release as saying: “One of my largest hopes for this tool is that it would help improve the care of Parkinson’s patients.”⁠[1]

The website of London Tech Week 2022 (June 13–15, 2022) lists her as a speaker, as founder at FacePrint; the biography describes her as a STEM advocate and an AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador who studies computer science and neuroscience at Stanford University and was a Thiel Fellow before university.⁠[12]

On June 21, 2022, the European Patent Office announced that she had won first place in the inaugural Young Inventors Prize, jointly with the UK-based recycling entrepreneurs Victor Dewulf and Peter Hedley; the release states that the duo and she would receive a cash prize of EUR 20,000, which the release the European Patent Office distributed through PR NewswirePR NewswirePR Newswire is an American press release distribution service founded in New York in 1954 by Herbert Muschel. It sends news releases from companies, organizations, and public relations firms simultaneously to the media and the investment community, and is one of the pioneers of the commercial newswire industry; since 2016 it has been a business of the communications software company Cision.Open the full entry puts at roughly $21,000.⁠[7][27][9]

The release states that at 16 she noticed the “mask face” symptom in an early video of Michael J. Fox and then, with a book on coding and video footage of people with Parkinson’s, used facial recognition software to train an artificial intelligence algorithm. She is quoted as saying: “I remember the first moment where the first algorithm actually worked and that that was magical to see,” and: “It’s incredibly exciting to see this idea I had back in high school in my kitchen, turn into a tangible technology that has the potential to create a positive impact in the world and improve the care of Parkinson’s disease.”⁠[7][27]

António Campinos said in the release: “Through earlier intervention her invention has the potential to have a real impact on people’s lives.” The European Patent Office’s winner page gives her technical field as medical technology and her company as FacePrint, and states that she watched a YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry clip of Michael J. Fox and that she and her team have focused on building an inclusive dataset, enabling accurate detection across gender and race.⁠[27][9]

On August 23, 2022, the Linda Hall Library published an article on the prize won by its former Shipman Award winner, quoting her as “grateful and excited to receive the European Young Inventor Award” and as planning to “build a future of neurological health that is objective, personalized, and preventative.”⁠[19]

On December 13, 2022, the Global Brain Health Institute published an article stating that the Alzheimer’s Association, the Global Brain Health Institute and the UK-based Alzheimer’s Society had announced the latest recipients of the Pilot Awards for Global Brain Health Leaders; the round comprises 23 awards, among them her project in the United States, “A deep learning tool for FTD and AD by automated facial expressions.” The article gives the total funding of the round as approximately $575,000, with about $25,000 for each individual award. Her profile page at the institute lists this article.⁠[30][25]

The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s researcher biography states that in high school she also worked on a clean oil sand extraction method, on mechanisms of neuronal pruning and on mechanisms of visual attention. The biography on the website of the National Academy of Future Physicians and Medical Scientists lists developing a clean oil-sand extraction method, investigating neuronal remodeling at the Weizmann Institute, and determining visual attention strategies via eye tracking at Harvard Medical School; that biography also calls her a 2018 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair winner.⁠[11][28]

The project abstract database of Society for Science holds an abstract under her name, with Shawnee Mission West High School as the school, titled “FacePrint: A Novel, Differential Diagnostic and Monitoring Tool for Parkinson’s Disease, Essential Tremor, and Atypical Parkinsonism Using Facial Behavioral Biomarkers and Dynamic Video Footage Tracking with Machine Learning”; the page does not name the fair or the year.⁠[31]

The abstract states that the study enrolled 69 participants, comprising people with Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor or atypical parkinsonism and healthy controls, who watched video clips and replicated emoticons while a webcam recorded their faces, producing 621 facial response videos. The videos were analyzed with automated facial coding software at 14 frames per second for 34 facial landmarks, and a three-layer feature selection process identified facial biomarkers that were used to train decision tree and Random Forest models; the abstract gives the accuracy of the best decision tree models, measured against already diagnosed patients, as 99.9 percent.⁠[31]

The awards listed on the page are a First Award of $5,000, a First Award of $1,500 from the American Statistical Association, and the Agni Second Place Award of $500 from the Samvid Education Foundation.⁠[31]

In her 2021 interview she said that she enjoys long runs, yoga, making bread (which she started doing as a child) and long catch-up conversations with friends.⁠[2]

Speaking of home she said: “I definitely miss barbecue.” She said she had not found barbecue in the Bay Area that compares, and that she also misses “a work ethic, a level of diligence that Kansans exemplify really well,” as well as a neighborly warmth, such as knowing all of one’s neighbors and smiling and talking with strangers at the grocery store.⁠[2]

She said: “I decided from a young age that I will optimize my time in life around learning.” On money, she said that if she became wealthy she hoped to stay frugal, her one indulgence being high-quality dark chocolate; a mentor had pointed out to her that people ask successful women about donating but not about investing, which she considers a problem, and she hopes to do both, through business investments and philanthropy.⁠[2]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[32]

Global Brain Health Institute: Official website: https://www.gbhi.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[29]

X: Public account: https://x.com/erinsm28 (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinsm (opens in a new window).⁠[25]