Harvard graduates Dhruba Bhatt and Stephen Turban are co-founders of Lumiere Education. Dhruba was a PhD student at Oxford University when he founded Lumiere.
I sat down with Lumiere co-founder Steven to discuss our mission of providing research opportunities for high school students, and what I didn’t expect was a deep dive into education, intellectual genealogy, and the audacity of pursuing unconventional paths.
These are my notes on the conversation between Stephen and me.
Stephen’s grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, and both he and his father were born in Hawaii, a place where education is highly valued. “My father grew up poor, but he loved to read as a child,” he says. “In college, he was passionate about research in the psychology lab, and that’s where it all began.” This family legend provided the Turbans with a living.
It shaped Stephen’s own worldview: “Education was like a family tradition, something that was really important,” he reflects. Ultimately, his exposure to education led him to respect “learning as a transformative force.”
But it was a high school exchange program in Taipei that changed Stephen’s worldview. “It completely changed my standards for what it meant to be hard-working,” he recalls, and he remains in awe of the tireless work ethic of his Taiwanese classmates. “We went from being pretty good students to being in the bottom quartile.”
These formative experiences laid the foundation for Lumiere, an initiative to make research accessible to students around the world, particularly in countries like India and Vietnam. “There are a lot of great ideas out there,” he notes. “But not many people who can bridge ideas in different contexts.”
Lumiere is his attempt to build such a bridge, to democratize not only access to academic resources but also immersion in the rich intellectual traditions that shape groundbreaking researchers. “What matters more is what is the intellectual lineage that you are shaped by and who you are learning from,” he emphasizes. So I found it fascinating that Stephen praised the Indian Gurukul system and the “Guru-Shisha Parampara” as a unique and effective intellectual lineage.
This emphasis on mentorship and lineage is central to Lumiere’s model. By pairing high school students with PhD students and postdocs from around the world, Stephen hopes to create a conduit for the transmission of tacit knowledge and unspoken rules of academia. “The mentor’s perspective plays a really important role in shaping the young researcher’s perspective of what they can and can’t do,” he explains. “These young students essentially become part of the lineage that these PhD students and postdocs and professors belong to.”
Of course, there is also the question of whether high school students are prepared to make meaningful contributions to serious research. Stephen acknowledges the limitations of domain expertise and “perceived legitimacy,” but he emphasizes students’ unique strengths, including a tendency to think across disciplines, fresh perspectives, and, in cutting-edge fields such as AI, technical competence.
So what does Lumiere look for in his applicants? Intellectual curiosity is paramount. “We want people who are passionate about the subject,” he laughs. Academic achievement is important, but only as a sign of hard work and the ability to learn quickly. Equally important is the ability to work independently, a prerequisite for the often solitary pursuit of research.
When asked what skills aspiring researchers should have, the founder’s advice is to “be comfortable with ambiguity.” Stephen emphasizes, “The skill set of truly successful researchers is those who can sit in ambiguity and get excited about the possibilities. When you notice something ambiguous, you should feel like going and exploring it.”
In the future, Stephen and Dhruva envision Lumiere evolving from a “3% supplement” to a more integral part of students’ education, with the goal being closer partnerships with schools, comprehensive curricula, and programs that are immersive enough to make up “90% of someone’s learning experience.”
But he also wondered why there weren’t more researchers. “Being a researcher means you are essentially subsidizing the world with your labor.” Making policy and practice changes is the way forward to encourage more research.
But even as Lumiere expands, Stephen and Dhruva remain committed to the school’s core mission of bridging cultural and academic divides. For Indian students in particular, Stephen sees the program as an opportunity to combine the rigorous foundations of an Indian school education with the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of the Western classroom. “The secondary and primary education system here is [India] “They’re really good at teaching the fundamentals of math and STEM and stuff like that,” he points out, “but the piece that’s often missing is, ‘How do I create? How do I make something new?'”
It’s the combination of tradition and innovation, depth and breadth that Steven believes in. “There are so many people out there who are really talented and could do so much if they were given just a little bit more of a chance,” he marvels.
“Research is intellectual entrepreneurship,” Stephen says. “It’s like, ‘How can we discover something new?'” Through Lumiere, he’s not only asking a new generation that question, but equipping them to answer it.
“Stephen currently lives in Vietnam and Dhruva is from Chennai. They have formed a great partnership that will take them to many different places. We can’t wait to see where that takes them.”
I sat down with Lumiere co-founder Steven to discuss our mission of providing research opportunities for high school students, and what I didn’t expect was a deep dive into education, intellectual genealogy, and the audacity of pursuing unconventional paths.
These are my notes on the conversation between Stephen and me.
Stephen’s grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, and both he and his father were born in Hawaii, a place where education is highly valued. “My father grew up poor, but he loved to read as a child,” he says. “In college, he was passionate about research in the psychology lab, and that’s where it all began.” This family legend provided the Turbans with a living.
It shaped Stephen’s own worldview: “Education was like a family tradition, something that was really important,” he reflects. Ultimately, his exposure to education led him to respect “learning as a transformative force.”
But it was a high school exchange program in Taipei that changed Stephen’s worldview. “It completely changed my standards for what it meant to be hard-working,” he recalls, and he remains in awe of the tireless work ethic of his Taiwanese classmates. “We went from being pretty good students to being in the bottom quartile.”
These formative experiences laid the foundation for Lumiere, an initiative to make research accessible to students around the world, particularly in countries like India and Vietnam. “There are a lot of great ideas out there,” he notes. “But not many people who can bridge ideas in different contexts.”
Lumiere is his attempt to build such a bridge, to democratize not only access to academic resources but also immersion in the rich intellectual traditions that shape groundbreaking researchers. “What matters more is what is the intellectual lineage that you are shaped by and who you are learning from,” he emphasizes. So I found it fascinating that Stephen praised the Indian Gurukul system and the “Guru-Shisha Parampara” as a unique and effective intellectual lineage.
This emphasis on mentorship and lineage is central to Lumiere’s model. By pairing high school students with PhD students and postdocs from around the world, Stephen hopes to create a conduit for the transmission of tacit knowledge and unspoken rules of academia. “The mentor’s perspective plays a really important role in shaping the young researcher’s perspective of what they can and can’t do,” he explains. “These young students essentially become part of the lineage that these PhD students and postdocs and professors belong to.”
Of course, there is also the question of whether high school students are prepared to make meaningful contributions to serious research. Stephen acknowledges the limitations of domain expertise and “perceived legitimacy,” but he emphasizes students’ unique strengths, including a tendency to think across disciplines, fresh perspectives, and, in cutting-edge fields such as AI, technical competence.
So what does Lumiere look for in his applicants? Intellectual curiosity is paramount. “We want people who are passionate about the subject,” he laughs. Academic achievement is important, but only as a sign of hard work and the ability to learn quickly. Equally important is the ability to work independently, a prerequisite for the often solitary pursuit of research.
When asked what skills aspiring researchers should have, the founder’s advice is to “be comfortable with ambiguity.” Stephen emphasizes, “The skill set of truly successful researchers is those who can sit in ambiguity and get excited about the possibilities. When you notice something ambiguous, you should feel like going and exploring it.”
In the future, Stephen and Dhruva envision Lumiere evolving from a “3% supplement” to a more integral part of students’ education, with the goal being closer partnerships with schools, comprehensive curricula, and programs that are immersive enough to make up “90% of someone’s learning experience.”
But he also wondered why there weren’t more researchers. “Being a researcher means you are essentially subsidizing the world with your labor.” Making policy and practice changes is the way forward to encourage more research.
But even as Lumiere expands, Stephen and Dhruva remain committed to the school’s core mission of bridging cultural and academic divides. For Indian students in particular, Stephen sees the program as an opportunity to combine the rigorous foundations of an Indian school education with the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of the Western classroom. “The secondary and primary education system here is [India] “They’re really good at teaching the fundamentals of math and STEM and stuff like that,” he points out, “but the piece that’s often missing is, ‘How do I create? How do I make something new?'”
It’s the combination of tradition and innovation, depth and breadth that Steven believes in. “There are so many people out there who are really talented and could do so much if they were given just a little bit more of a chance,” he marvels.
“Research is intellectual entrepreneurship,” Stephen says. “It’s like, ‘How can we discover something new?'” Through Lumiere, he’s not only asking a new generation that question, but equipping them to answer it.
“Stephen currently lives in Vietnam and Dhruva is from Chennai. They have formed a great partnership that will take them to many different places. We can’t wait to see where that takes them.”
