Big goals for a better world: Local student awarded grant to support her groundbreaking medical research – The Dickinson Press

DICKINSON — When she was on her way to school on Halloween, Ava Hauck received an email that made her turn around and drive home to share the news with her dad. The email was a notification that her newly formed business, Clinivue, had just been awarded a $50,000 grant through Innovate ND.

Hauck, a junior at Dickinson High School, had just filed her business as an LLC with the North Dakota Secretary of State’s Office that summer, along with obtaining a provisional patent for her technology. With the grant money, she was able to look forward to starting phase one clinical trials for her patented medical device.

This all started with a science fair project.

When Hauck was an eighth grader at Dickinson Middle School, she decided to participate in the science fair. Under the mentorship of science teacher Gretchen Flatz, Hauck’s first project was about light pollution, and it won first place.

“Miss Flatz was the first person who believed in any of my science fair projects,” Hauck said.

The confidence instilled by her teacher, as well as her success at her first science fair, fueled Hauck to keep going with science fair into high school.

At her second science fair as a freshman at DHS, her project — a wildfire camera that Hauck built — also took home first place. As a high schooler, Hauck’s science fair victory resulted in a hefty $53,000 college scholarship.

Flatz credits Hauck’s success in science fair to her driven personality.

“Ava is very interested in accomplishing big goals to make the world a better place. With every project she’s done for science fair, she’s trying to solve real world problems,” Flatz said.

Consistently outdoing herself, Hauck’s sophomore year project would take her far beyond science fair victory — it would become a technology with the potential to save lives.

When trying to come up with an idea for her third science fair, Hauck knew she wanted to continue coding, as she enjoyed that aspect of her previous science fair project. She says she was encouraged by more supportive teachers, such as Elisa Kensinger and Bridget Jacob, to choose an idea that she was passionate about on a personal level.

This encouragement inspired Hauck to start developing a diagnostic device for leukemia, as a close relative of hers had battled the disease. Later, though, the project would evolve to serve a slightly different purpose.

As Hauck explains it, the final product, Clinivue, is “an AI portable diagnostic device created to help low-resource areas.” The technology uses blood samples to identify biomarkers for various hematological diseases, such as malaria and sepsis.

Hauck started the coding work for Clinivue in November 2024 to have it ready for the March regional science fair. The first program, Hauck said, was not accurate at all.

“The accuracy at first was around 50.2, which is just random guessing for an AI program,” Hauck said.

Over the first month, Hauck worked tirelessly to harness the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which is the AI she used. After a month of working with it, Hauck finally got the program to work. After a month of errors, this was Clinivue’s first big win — one of many to come.

From there, Hauck kept training the CNN, tweaking her program and preparing for the science fair. In March, Hauck’s project tied for first place, eventually taking home the second place prize, which was another college scholarship. By then, Hauck knew she wanted to take Clinivue further.

“I have always loved business since I was younger. All of my family are entrepreneurs, and I always knew that I would be in business. I fell in love with the Clinivue Project, and I said to myself, ‘Here’s your opportunity, Ava,’ ” she said.

Hauck kept working on Clinivue through the summer — refining the program, working on her business plan, prototyping and development, applying for grants and networking. Her networking led her to Mark Wagner, who became her business coach. Along with Hauck’s supportive father, Kelly Hauck, Wagner helped get Clinivue LLC off the ground.

Clinivue is a small entity, especially when compared to her competitors, as Hauck cites big names like Microsoft and Fisher Industries as companies also on the forefront of AI-powered diagnostic technology.

What sets Clinivue apart, though, is what truly excites Hauck. Clinivue is small, portable and extremely inexpensive compared to the massive, expensive machines engineered by her competitors. This means that it is actually designed to help the populations most affected by the diseases it was designed to detect.

According to the World Health Organization, there were 280 million cases of malaria in 2024, with the disease ultimately claiming 610,000 lives globally. The numbers for sepsis and sickle cell are similarly staggering — and these diseases claim disproportionately more lives in low-resource countries.

These countries are where Clinivue is aimed, so for Hauck, maintaining a low price point and high accuracy is vital.

Contributed / Ava Hauck

After months of applying for grants to take her business to the next level, Hauck was invited to pitch her business at the Innovate ND panel meeting. With her dad, Hauck says she fought the worst nerves of her life to present Clinivue to the panel. It ended up being what Hauck describes as “the best presentation of my life.”

A few weeks later, she found out that she had won the grant. With the Innovate ND grant, Hauck and her small team can take next steps toward deploying the device to low-resource communities. Those includes FDA testing, getting a non-provisional patent and commercializing the business.

On a personal level, Hauck looks forward to continuing her education, with an eye toward achieving certificates in pathology, so that she can handle the blood samples used with Clinivue, and eventually interact with patients.

Talking with Ava Hauck, her passion for Clinivue is evident. As she strives to fill gaps in the global health care landscape, it is truly looking like the future is limitless for Hauck and her technology.