9th grade: all honors
4.25 GPA, 4.0 unweighted.
Prefer to drive? Visit the island.
Conrad Spaudie
I build software, then find out whether it works.
Open to summer 2027 research or startup internships in AI, medical imaging, or energy.
cspaudie@gmail.com · LinkedIn · GitHub · Instagram
About
I'm a junior at Saint Joseph Notre Dame in Alameda, California. Right now that means an AI phonics tutor designed around a controlled reading study, a web app that measures real breast biopsy slides, and a tool for the environmental side of nuclear siting that I've been taking to the people who would use it. I'm also class president, a national debate competitor, and part of TKS San Francisco this year.
Languages: English, Mandarin
Off the clock: Calisthenics, Swimming, Piano, Cooking, Violin (played recitals)
Academics
Grades
10th grade: AP History, AP Calculus AB and AP Physics
All A's, with a 5 on the AP Physics 1 exam. Academic Achievement Awards in Physics and Religion. 4.57 GPA, 4.0 unweighted.
11th grade: AP Chemistry, AP English Language and AP Mandarin
Plus four college classes at College of Alameda: Physics 4A and Calculus II this fall, Physics 4B and Calculus III in the spring. On track for a 4.86 GPA, 4.0 unweighted.
Coursework
Physics 4A and Calculus II at College of Alameda
College courses I'm taking alongside my junior year at SJND.
First at SJND to take AP Physics and AP Calculus as a sophomore
AP Physics 1: 5
Awards
Presidential Scholarship
SJND's merit award for academics and leadership, all four years of high school.
Perfect 1400 on Star Math
Builds
Seven projects: what's running, what's in the works, and what I stopped, with the reason.
Running
OncoScan
Read a breast biopsy the way the model does.
Pick a real breast fine-needle-aspirate slide. The server outlines every cell nucleus, measures the eight features lab software extracts, runs a model trained on 569 real patients, and explains the call as a count out of 100 patients, not a percentage.
What I found: Every number has to explain itself. Version one showed eight numbers and a slider, and nobody in the room, including me, could say what a "worst radius of 12.2" meant. So I moved measurement to the server and made every number answer three questions: what is it, what is normal, and what did it do to the result. Nine versions in three days.
- Segmentation runs in OpenCV on the server, calibrated against benign reference slides
- A nine-unit course inside the app teaches the Yokohama criteria on 315 real cases from 13 hospitals, with spaced repetition and mastery gates
- Every image is a real scan or photograph, and every one is credited
- Educational demo. Not a medical device.
Nine versions in three days
- v1, Sep 19, morning: A slider for every number
- v2, Sep 19, afternoon: Every number explains itself
- v3, Sep 19, evening: Measurement moves to the server
- v4, Sep 19, night: Borrowing from portfolios I liked
- v5, Sep 20, small hours: Real slides
- v6, Sep 20, morning: Nothing drawn, everything photographed
- v7, Sep 20, afternoon: The patients behind the model
- v8, Sep 20, evening: A course
- v9, Sep 21, morning: An outline you can actually see
SJND Chess
A ladder app for my school's chess club.
Club members sign in with a school email, play rated games, and climb an Elo ladder. Games can be imported straight from Chess.com.
What I found: Test the math before the screens. A club ladder lives or dies on its ratings being right, so the Elo code got its own unit tests before any screen existed, and the ladder was built on top of it.
- School-email sign-in, so the app itself is members only
- Elo ratings with unit-tested rating math
- Chess.com game import
Links: Open (members sign in)
Build rig
The multi-agent setup I build everything else with.
One planner writes contracts first, several builder agents code against them in parallel, and a separate verifier checks the result in a real browser before I see it. OncoScan and this site were both built on it.
What I found: Contracts before code. Fixing every exported name, prop, and section id before any agent writes a line is what let four builders work at once with zero integration fixes. The rules that matter are enforced by hooks and tests, not by the prompt, because prompts don't hold.
- Security checks run before visual checks
- The verifier returns a pass or fail table, so screenshots never flood the builders' context
- This site: a fresh verifier agent passed it on 43 of 43 checks
In the works
readtutor
An AI phonics tutor that hears which sound you missed.
A tutor for kids learning to decode. It shows a word, listens to the child read it aloud, scores every sound separately, and coaches the exact sound they missed. It is the loop a good reading tutor runs, automated.
What I found: Judge the sound, not the word. At the word level, "sip" and "ship" score five points apart and both pass. At the phoneme level they score 100 and 45. And a correct word-final /t/ or /p/ scores 54 to 78 while held sounds like /s/ score 87 to 100, so a single pass mark can never be fair. Thresholds have to be set per class of sound.
- Found and fixed a microphone leak in the Azure speech SDK that was failing 86 percent of attempts
- No child data until the review board approves
- Known limitation, already logged: it catches some sound swaps and misses others, so a full substitution test comes first
Siteline
Closing the environmental gap in nuclear siting.
AI data centers need more power than the grid can add, and much of the industry is looking at nuclear. Siteline started as a tracker for candidate sites. Customer discovery pointed it at a newer problem: as the NRC narrows its reviews to radiation, the environmental due diligence outside the fence (waterways, wildlife habitat, water tables) has no clear owner. Siteline now aims to pull those public environmental layers together for each candidate site, so whoever ends up owning the review starts from a complete base.
What I found: The first customer I designed for didn't exist. Two weeks of customer discovery showed that site screening is already a free government tool and that developers do siting in-house. Then a call with GAIN, the Department of Energy's nuclear innovation program at Idaho National Laboratory, turned up the real gap: with the NRC drawing its line at radiation, nobody clearly owns the environmental review. That gap is what Siteline is for now.
- Python v1 pulls live ERCOT interconnection-queue data, keeps active projects over 300 MW, and geocodes and ranks them: 318 sites mapped
- About 15 cold emails to nuclear engineering faculty, think tanks, and policy researchers
- Email exchanges with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher who has developed OR-SAGE, the lab's power-plant siting tool, since 2009
- Sep 2026: a call with GAIN's public engagement lead surfaced the unowned environmental review and pointed me to EPRI's siting guide, the industry's standard method
- Next: test the new direction with an environmental consultant and a state energy office before building it
- Entered in the Conrad Challenge, Energy and Environment category
Paused or stopped, and why
SellSnap
Photos in, a ready-to-post marketplace listing out.
Snap a few photos of something you want to sell and SellSnap reads the labels, matches the product, and drafts the title, description, and a price for Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace.
What I found: The price is the whole product. I moved it from OpenAI to Gemini with search grounding, then built a benchmark that scores its price estimates against real eBay sold prices. That's how I learned pricing was the weak point: with no ground truth, the model was guessing. I paused it rather than pretend otherwise.
- Primary and lite Gemini models split by task, with a fallback when search quota runs out
Links: Open live
apiwatch
An early warning for breaking API changes.
Watches vendors' changelogs and flags changes that would break the apps built on them.
What I found: Know when to stop. I built the watcher, then did the market research: the best-known tool in the space died of onboarding friction, platforms like Shopify now publish their own API health reports, and three business days of outreach to agencies got no replies. So I stopped.
- The watcher works; the market wasn't there
The island version has six small games built on these projects.
Science and research
Where I do science, from a 7th grade yeast experiment to a week at a national lab and the study behind readtutor.
Effects of acidity on yeast growth
1st in my school, 3rd in the district, and 4th in the county.
Physics In and Through Cosmology
Five days with working physicists on dark matter, dark energy, the cosmic microwave background, and neutrinos. We toured the Advanced Light Source and saw a focal-plane petal from DESI, the instrument building the largest 3D map of the universe.
- My team interviewed DESI physicist Abby Bault about her work on why roughly 12 percent of the telescope's robotic fiber positioners went unstable, and on a redshift bias in quasar data
Real physics is mostly stumbling, and the stumbling is what gets you closer.
Links: Six weeks later, on LinkedIn
A letter to my senators
When QuarkNet's NSF funding wasn't renewed, I wrote to Senators Padilla and Schiff and to my House representative asking them to restore it. For more than 25 years it has been one of the few ways a high school student can get into real physics.
AI Phonics Tutors: The English Evidence Gap
Why there is so little published evidence on AI tutors for early English decoding, and what a credible study would need.
Can an AI tutor match a human one?
The benchmark is the d = 0.57 effect of one-to-one phonics tutoring. The design is a multiple-baseline single-case study across three phonics skills, where each child is their own control, measured three times a week with DIBELS 8 Nonsense Word Fluency. It goes to a review board before any child uses it.
Things I sell
Scrubs & Whiskers
Nurse humor with hidden cat jokes, made to order.
My print-on-demand store for nurses who own cats. I design the line around one orange tabby across tees, crewnecks, mugs, and totes, Printify prints and ships each order, and I make the marketing myself: storybook-style animated shorts for TikTok.
Links: Visit the store, TikTok
Websites for local businesses
A fast, clean site for your salon or restaurant, kept current every month.
I build the site once, then keep it up to date on a monthly Care Plan: menu and price changes, hours, photos, and hosting. I've pitched five Alameda businesses in person. This portfolio is the sample.
Links: Ask for a quote
Leadership and clubs
Class President, Class of 2028
Elected sophomore year and on the school-wide student council. We won one of the two biggest rallies of the year, and stayed ahead of the seniors longer than any sophomore class before us.
ASB Commissioner of Technology
Elected in spring 2026.
Founder and president, Math Club
Starting the school's math competition club and bringing contests like the AMC and Math Kangaroo to SJND. Math Kangaroo is approved for its first year.
Co-president, Chess Club
I co-run the club and built its ladder app. I started my middle school's lunch chess club in 7th grade.
Incoming president, Econ Club
An economics competition club. We also mentor junior high students in personal finance.
Link Leader
Helped run orientation day for the incoming freshman class.
Competitions
Speech & Debate
National Speech & Debate Tournament
Competed in Richmond, Virginia, on Team San Fran Bay Purple, a five-person Bay Area team.
2nd place overall speaker
At my second Congress tournament.
Robotics
Raspberry Pilots, FIRST Tech Challenge team 24610
Lead strategist. I designed the whole robot and I'm building it: a floor intake, a single-file collector, a diverter that picks the exit, a twin-belt launcher with a spring-floated gap for two ball sizes, and a vertical-lift placer, all inside the 8 motor and 8 servo limit.
4th place, Pioneers in Engineering
With the SJND robotics team.
Chess
1st in my section at the CalChess State Championships, 5-0
Five games, five wins. Online, I peaked at 1799 on Chess.com.
Links: USCF record, Chess.com
Academic contests
Academic Decathlon: 1st in the Bay Area region in math
Advanced to nationals. Our team placed 2nd overall in the region.
Esports
#275 in the US, Brawl Stars Ranked
Reached the top 300 of the US Ranked leaderboard, peaking at #275.
Athletics
Varsity cross country
Ran varsity as a freshman, with a 5:17 mile. Now I swim and do calisthenics.
Programs
The Knowledge Society (TKS)
A ten-month program for young builders working on emerging tech in AI, biotech, and energy. Week one was a 30-minute pitch on failing water infrastructure in Kiambu County, Kenya. Week two was OncoScan.
- The real lesson of week two: the spread in what people shipped came from how specific they were before hitting enter.
Thirty minutes is nowhere near enough to become an expert, and exactly enough to find the one fact that makes someone care.
Links: TKS, My TKS posts on LinkedIn
LCOY USA 2026 delegate
The official US youth climate conference under YOUNGO, the UN climate body's youth constituency. I'm one of about 125 delegates writing the US National Youth Statement that goes to COP.
My ask: Legal and financial on-ramps for young founders. A teenager can build a climate tool in an afternoon but can't open a business account or take payments without an adult. The technology says yes to young builders and the paperwork says no.
I'm going to listen and find out where I'm wrong about nuclear.
Links: LCOY USA, On LinkedIn
AGI Summit 2026
Two days in San Francisco on a student pass. I demoed SellSnap and heard from teams at Greptile and OpenAI's Codex.
Links: SellSnap live
UNA-USA GenUN member
The youth membership of the United Nations Association of the USA.
Mandarin in Shanghai
A summer of Mandarin study in Shanghai on a CIEE merit scholarship.
Service
House build, Guatemala
Ten days in San Cristóbal with my church group. We framed and roofed a two-bedroom house for a family whose old one had a dirt floor and a leaking sheet-steel roof, replaced their open-fire kitchen with a stove that vents outside, and ran Vacation Bible School for the kids.
On the last day we handed over the keys.
Links: On LinkedIn
Saturday kitchen crew
Eight-hour Saturday shifts of food prep and serving.
Presidential Volunteer Service Award, Gold
At the Alameda Food Bank and St. Vincent de Paul, plus tutoring in chess and math.
This year
My goals for 2026-27, and where each one stands. Every goal opens the thing it's about.
- Done: Get into TKS San Francisco (Aug 2026)
- Done: Get elected ASB Commissioner of Technology (Spring 2026)
- Done: Start Physics 4A and Calculus II at College of Alameda (Fall 2026)
- Done: Ship OncoScan (Sep 2026)
- Done: Get selected as an LCOY USA delegate (Aug 2026)
- In progress: Pass the Conrad Challenge Activation round with Siteline (Due Oct 30)
- In progress: Get readtutor's study approved by a review board (Fall 2026)
- In progress: Bring the AMC and Math Kangaroo to SJND (2026-27)
- In progress: Design and build the Raspberry Pilots' robot (2026-27)
- Up next: Help write the US National Youth Statement at LCOY (Oct 23 to 25)
- Up next: Enter readtutor at the Alameda County Science and Engineering Fair (Spring 2027)
- Up next: Take Physics 4B and Calculus III (Spring 2027)