Elliot Kim
The Potomac School
Elliott Kim was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 12. But it took a scary incident during his sophomore year of high school for him to look at managing his condition in a new way.
An avid runner who logs up to 40 miles per week, Kim was on a cross-country run with teammates when he suddenly felt weak and woozy—symptoms that in his case indicated a dangerous drop in his blood-sugar level.
Photo by Michael Ventura
“I went into hypoglycemic shock,” recalls the McLean resident. “Two other runners took turns carrying me piggyback” to safety. Now he carries glucose tablets and wears a device that continuously monitors his blood sugar.
“I realized I can still live well with this,” he says. “I just have to make the right decisions.”
The youngest of three children, Kim was the first in his family to have type 1. As he learned more about diabetes, he set out to share his findings with peers and cultivated a deeply personal interest in researching a cure for the disease, which affects 1.25 million people in the U.S. alone, according to the American Diabetes Association.
“I got involved with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in eighth grade,” says Kim, 17, who is now a youth ambassador for the organization and finished his junior year with an unweighted GPA of 3.76 (plus two AP classes under his belt). Through JDRF, as a youth delegate, he has pressed politicians—from Virginia Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine to Vice President Joe Biden, among others—to fund diabetes research more aggressively.
Active in the Fellowship of Christians in Universities and Schools and in his own local church, Kim is also a member of the Potomac School’s Science & Engineering Research Center. Through SERC, he is working this summer at MedStar Georgetown Transplant Institute to examine how some stem cells differentiate to become insulin-producing cells.
Each year, Kim solicits as many classmates as he can to raise funds and take part in JDRF’s 5K walkathon in Leesburg. “I invite the entire school to come out and wear blue,” he says. “When the bus doors open” and dozens of friends pour out, “it’s just amazing.” —Amy Rogers Nazarov