Dev Katarya (second from left), founder and leader of Arogya Club @ Agape, Atlanta
Dev Katarya, an Atlanta high school student, founded Arogya Club @ Agape in 2025. He and his peer have been taking lesson from Arogya World’s Healthy Schools Program to students in the underserved communities in the US. Alongside this work, he used data from the Healthy Schools Program for his research submission to the International Young Researchers’ Conference (IYRC), where he was selected as a winner.
Dev set out to find ‘Can school-based health education meaningfully influence how adolescents understand and prevent Type 2 diabetes?’ He analysed data from more than 11,000 students, aged 11–13 who participated in Arogya World’s Healthy Schools Program in West Bengal over two years.
He found aggregate scores increased from about 53% to 82% following the intervention and knowledge scores rose from approximately 65% to 98%, while behaviour scores moved from around 41% to 68%. One finding was especially striking. Before the intervention, more than 2,700 students scored below 49% overall. After the program, that number fell to just 35 students, a 98.7% reduction in those classified as poor performers.
But what stayed with Dev was the gap between knowing and doing, “That made me realize that knowing what is healthy and actually living that way are two very different things.” A child may understand why sugary drinks or fried foods increase health risks, he points out, while having little control over what food is available at home, family eating habits or opportunities to exercise.
It was an insight he carried into his work with Arogya Clubs in Atlanta. Instead of limiting sessions to lessons about healthy eating, his team began cooking and eating healthy meals with the children. They wanted students to experience healthier choices rather than simply hear about them.
He remembers one 12-year-old arriving at an early session surprised to learn how much sugar a soda beverage contained. By the end of the program, the same child was talking about why leafy green vegetables mattered.
For Dev, experiences like these changed his understanding of research itself. “I used to think of research mainly as analyzing data and reaching conclusions. Now I see it as part of a much larger cycle.”
He hopes to expand the peer-led Arogya Clubs model to more schools in Atlanta. He also wants to study whether changes seen after health education persist six months, a year or several years later, and better understand the barriers that prevent knowledge from becoming behaviour. Dev is interested to work at the intersection of science, data, public health and implementation. And wants to figure out how evidence can be translated into something that improves people’s everyday lives.
At Arogya World, stories like Dev’s make us proud.
Our Healthy Schools Program was built to help young people make healthier choices early in life. But its impact can travel in directions we never predicted. This is the kind of generation we are proud to have alongside us. They are not waiting to contribute but are learning, questioning, testing and leading now.