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Inspira Foundation's Vision
Inspira Foundation's Vision
We are committed to inspiring and nurturing a generation of curious, capable, and compassionate student innovators who are ready to apply their STEM knowledge and creativity to tackle real-world challenges and make meaningful contributions to their communities.
Our Story
Our Story
Technology is advancing rapidly and becoming ever more integrated into our lives, and it's particularly important to GenZ population to embrace the revolution. As of 2025, roughly 20% of the US population is considered GenZ, with California alone accounting for about 8.1 million of them. School curricula, however, do not always keep pace with the changes and students are left either unprepared for their future or having to self-learn through navigating a maze of fragmented resources, online and offline. At the same time, increasing academic pressure pushes students toward test-driven learning, stifling creativity and discouraging real-world problem-solving.
Lucas and Saria see an opportunity to make a difference. They believe in making advanced STEM education accessible to all curious minds, strengthening scientific literacy across the community and creating spaces for students to explore and innovate. This approach is especially important to fields like healthcare and medicine, where creativity, technical skill, and opportunities to investigate and learn can result in solutions that impact lives.
This is where Inspira Foundation comes in.
Our Founders
Our Founders
Lucas Lum
Lucas Lum
Founder & Co-President
Lucas is a student at The Harker School passionate about both computer science and biological science. By combining his interest in app and game development with a drive to address health challenges, he explores creative solutions to real-world problems. His latest project, CogniPlay, a deep learning-powered multimodality mobile app for early Alzheimer’s detection, transforms cognitive assessments into engaging games. By offering a simple, non-invasive and accessible tool to monitor cognitive changes, CogniPlay aims to help elderly seek timely medical intervention and potentially benefit from emerging treatments that slow disease progression.
At the Inspira Foundation, Lucas launched the InspireLearn program which aims to teach hands-on technical skills and empower students to turn knowledge into practical solutions. He also co-founded InspireLabs with his sister, Saria, to provide a platform for sparking new ideas and showcasing student-led science innovations with the broader community.
Saria Lum
Saria Lum
Founder & Co-President
Saria is a student at The Harker School with a passion for ballet and biomedical research, aspiring to become a dermatologist. Through her work with the Inspira Foundation, she hopes to introduce younger students to the fundamentals of research and inspire others to stay curious about science. As a founder of the InspiraMakers and InspiraLink programs, she is committed to making science more accessible by transforming complex concepts into clear, engaging content that bridges the gap between research and everyday understanding.
Saria's research journey began with a project focused on improving seaweed-based biofabric as an alternative to single-use plastic by replacing the toxic firming agent calcium chloride with food-safe, eco-friendly calcium lactate. The project earned multiple awards at local and state science fairs and was named a Top 300 project in the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge. She is currently conducting medicinal chemistry research in the Njoo Lab through the Aspiring Scholars Directed Research Program (ASDRP).
Our Team
Our Team
More to come...
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