TA News

If you asked Thetford Academy senior Elijah Renner how he spent his summer vacation, the answer might surprise you. As a student who thrives on academic challenge, summer for Elijah often means taking every opportunity to dive deeply into his areas of interest, especially the intersection of science and emerging technology. 

Here at TA, Elijah shines as a student, competes on the debate team, is a founding member of the STEM club, and runs with the cross country and track and field teams. Outside of school, he has distinguished himself as a STEM scholar, working on research with scientists from the New Hampshire Academy of Science, the Dartmouth Reality and Robotics Lab, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and Stanford University, among others. 

In 2024, he won Vermont’s Congressional App Challenge for his app “Lymely,” designed to help individuals recognize Lyme disease early, and this year, he took top honors at the Vermont STEM fair for his work ​​developing synthetic MRI images of glioma cancers for diagnostic purposes. 

This summer, Elijah spent much of his time working in the EDIT AI program, an internship with the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (EDIT is an acronym Emerging Diagnostic and Investigative Technologies). His work there focused on using novel AI tools to automate parts of the medical billing and coding process and was the “first to explore using large-scale pathology report corpora to pretrain large language models to predict primary CPT (current procedural determinology) codes.” In other words, exploring the potential of AI to assist with medical coding and billing. 

“The internship was an incredible opportunity to learn more about pathology,” Elijah said in an interview, “and I was so fortunate to work with such amazing faculty.” With large language learning models now widely available, he added, “the open problem shifts toward identifying appropriate applications for them.” Elijah was one of only three students (out of 22) chosen to present their work to Dartmouth’s medical faculty.  

Today, Elijah is continuing his work with Stanford’s Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine & Imaging. He’s also making time to soak up his last fall as a high school student, spending time with friends, running and biking outdoors. In addition, he says, Thetford Academy’s “STEM Club has a lot of great new talent – and that makes me so excited.”