Impatience a Virtue for Biomedical Engineering Freshman and Company Founder

Biomedical engineering student Jeremiah Pate refused to wait until after graduation to found a company, and now he is designing satellites to explore asteroids and proteins to battle Parkinson's disease, even before finishing his freshman year.

"Impatience is a virtue," says Pate, a biomedical engineering major and founder of a company called Lunasonde. Pate was told to wait until after earning a bachelor's degree to start a company, and told to wait until graduate school to start research on a potential therapy for Parkinson's disease.

Instead, as a senior in high school in Oro Valley, Arizona, Pate started Lunasonde, which specializes in small inexpensive satellites. These "picosatellites" can identify deposits of precious metals, natural gas and water beneath the surface of the Earth.

When he isn't working on his schoolwork, Pate researches gene therapy for Parkinson's disease in the lab of molecular and cellular biology and neurology professor Daniela Zarnescu.