TROY — Julian DuPont has been tutoring and mentoring fellow college students in organic chemistry ever since he was a freshman, which sounds thoroughly ordinary until one considers the point spread.

DuPont was a 12-year-old college chemistry student and his classmates were mostly six or eight years older.

Back then, in 2014, he was attending Bard College. He transferred to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute the next year. He continued tutoring classmates who needed help in chemistry, but also genetics and evolution.

He graduates from RPI this month at age 15. He wants to go to medical school and be a doctor, perhaps a surgeon.

"But first, I'll take a gap year and do volunteer work, maybe at a nursing home or a hospital," DuPont said. "I'm not really old enough to be working with patients as a researcher or a physician yet."

DuPont has been reading ever since he was 3 years old. When he was 5, he had a microscope. He writes in his two-page autobiographical summary that "immunology became my childhood playground. There was an immunology card game that I made out of my immune cell drawings that showed the functions of white blood cells fighting off pathogens."

As he talks about his various RPI research projects, there is one he clearly loved. It involves jellyfish that glow a neon green due to Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). These jellyfish are born with the single gene containing the code for GFP. DuPont and RPI chemical biology lecturer Michael Aldersley worked together on a project in an attempt to synthetically create GFP.

When a visitor asked DuPont what pragmatic use GFP has in the prosaic world, he replies that when GFP is inserted correctly into another organism, it will glow green, too.

"It's been done with mice that glow green in the dark," DuPont said, smiling brightly. "There are pet stores that sell green glowing mice."

Aldersley explains that GFP can be used to mark certain organisms to make it easier to track them inside a body. Researchers could, for example, track cancer cells or parts of the brain affected by Alzheimer's disease.

Aldersley was impressed with DuPont's quick, nimble intellect from their first meeting.

"His thought process was so rapid he would often complete one of my sentences before I finished it," Aldersley said wryly.

DuPont is not related to the American dynasty that owns DuPont Chemical, the world's 4th largest chemical company. He's a Capital Region born and bred genius with a father who was a Mt. Sinai project manager and a psychologist mom.

"When he interacts with other students, they are respectful of his intelligence," said Aldersley. "If I had ever observed anyone being patronizing or inappropriate, I would have intervened."

DuPont adds quickly and emphatically that no one ever treated him rudely or disparaged his youth: "I've always felt that I was treated with respect."

And he's eager to expand his array of relationships. His GFP research and his teaching convinced him he would like to be a doctor partly because tutoring taught him he relishes the human interaction of medicine. He's particularly interested in neurology.

He was home-schooled before he entered Bard. And he concedes that college life was rather solitary. For most university grads, campus life will always inspire fond nostalgia partly because it involves study groups and marathon all-night conversations. DuPont lived at home while he attended RPI so that was not typical of his experience.

"I don't have much to talk about with my classmates outside of class work ... I don't have any friends my own age," DuPont said. "But I don't need the social element in order to learn." While parties and coffee chats haven't been his priority so far "there are plenty of years ahead for me to have all that."