Young Change Makers: Why and How Okezue Bell of The Knowledge Society Is Helping To Change Our World

Make more friends. Once you have friends, it also becomes difficult to make new ones, but growing your network is crucial to your success. I personally use LinkedIn super often, which helps me get more opportunities, and connect with people who connect me with the people that I want to talk to, which is great!

As part of my series about young people who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Okezue Bell.

Okezue Bell is a budding youth researcher and alum of The Knowledge Society (TKS) with interests in human-computer interactions/interfaces (HCIs) and bio-sciences. He is currently doing research at Harvard (Mass General Hospital) and MIT (Media Lab) in the neuroscience and machine learning spaces, working on developing and implementing innovations to medical systems, such as prosthetics. Previous to this, he worked on a project with Microsoft Research and American College of Radiology to deploy a respiratory disease diagnosis pipeline across 20 US hospitals, and is currently developing an equitable banking startup called Fidutam.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?

For sure! Honestly, I had quite the normal immigrant upbringing. My mom is from Nigeria, my dad is from the states, I have 3 older siblings, and I live in the suburbia of Pennsylvania. My family has always valued education, high grades, etc., but unlike my other siblings, who followed career paths — surgeon, engineering, finance — I’ve always liked a lot of everything, and had trouble deciding what I wanted to do. My mom and dad are engineers by trade, and so they encouraged me to code. I got into FoxPro, Bash, and Python; I was too impatient to start with scratch. I also did a lot of other things that I enjoyed: violin, chess, etc., extracurriculars/hobbies that I still regularly engage with!