Hidden Gems: Meet Bettina Lee of Project Pulmonary

Today we’d like to introduce you to Bettina Lee.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Of course! So I was born in New York, which is funny to think about now because it was snowing the day I was born and wildfires were probably the last thing on anyone’s mind. My family moved to Southern California when I was little, and I basically went from one of the least wildfire-prone places in the country to the most.

For most of my childhood, fire season became a normality that I accepted. Smoke in the sky, ash on the car, everyone shrugging it off. Then the infamous Palisades Fire hit last year and it stopped being something I observed in the background. It was all over the news, but for me the headline barely mattered. Behind the blaring sirens and orange sky, I saw my community in devastation, the suffocating air I was breathing, and people I knew losing everything. Something in me just shifted and I remember thinking that I couldn’t keep watching this happen and doing nothing about it. And so, I’d like to credit the origin of my changemaker journey to this single event that reshaped how I viewed the world around me.

Sophomore year began and I led a yearlong lung cancer service project through L4C. I partnered with the American Lung Association (largest lung health organization in America) and by the end of it, we earned the top grant of $9,300. I think that was the first time it hit me that a high schooler with a decent idea and enough stubbornness could actually move real resources toward a real problem. But honestly, the bigger realization was that I loved doing it. Not the award part, but the actual work itself. So I founded Project Pulmonary, an international 501(c)(3) public health nonprofit organization focused on lung cancer prevention in firefighters.

That same stretch of time was kind of chaotic in the best way. I wrote and published a children’s book about smoking cessation called The Cloud That Carried No Rain, and I co-developed an app called Lungitude+, which is a wildfire carcinogenic particulate tracking system with educational modules built in. It ended up winning the Congressional App Challenge, and at their conference in D.C., I got selected as one of five U.S. Capitol speakers out of over 400+ candidates. Standing there talking about the future of STEM and technology was surreal, because a year before that, I was just a high schooler ecstatic about getting a day off from school from the California wildfires.

Then I got into my top choice summer research program that summer, and it was my first real full-time research experience. I fell completely in love with the research community, so I decided junior year was going to be the year I locked in and tried to change the world through research too. Going in, I thought I’d be all about bioengineering and stem cell therapies, and while I do love those, I discovered I was really fascinated with biomaterials and sustainability. From there, I co-developed PuriFIRE, a regenerative VOC filter using a zeolite-TiO2 nanocomposite and photocatalysis, so instead of just trapping wildfire carcinogens it actively degrades them into less harmful byproducts. We designed it as an alternative to the SCBA gear firefighters carry now. PuriFIRE ended up winning at Regeneron ISEF, which people call the Olympics of Science, and it was through this competition that I found the people I call my closest friends to this day. I met so many people, and a lot of them turned out to be in the startup world. I got accepted to YC Startup School and went in late July, where I met some of the coolest people in tech.

A lot more has happened since, but if I could emphasize one thing, it’d be this: people only ever post their wins. That’s what gets attention and that’s what feels worth sharing, so I get it. But behind every person you see winning is a mountain of failure. I’ve gotten more than 60+ rejections in the past two years alone and lost opportunities I really really wanted. It’s okay to not be perfect and it’s okay to have those days where you’re just spiraling on yourself. What’s not okay is letting those thoughts sit there and chip away at your momentum. Everyone loves saying rejection is redirection, and sure, sometimes that is true. But a lot of the time, the rejection is just out of your control. The only part you actually control is what you do next.

The other thing I’d say is to stop chasing titles and start chasing impact. Nobody is going to remember what position you held in a club or what spot you played, but they’re going to remember what you actually did with it and how you changed what that role meant for whoever comes after you. Find weird, creative ways to stand out, and don’t be scared to put yourself out there for the stuff you actually care about.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Absolutely not. Like I mentioned in my previous answer, failure and rejection became the two words I used most in my vocabulary (aside from “lung cancer” probably). I’ve collected more than 60 rejections in the past two years alone. Programs I built my whole summer around, grants I was sure we’d get, competitions I’d prepped months for. Some of them I found out about at 11 p.m. on a school night and had to show up the next morning like nothing happened. The hardest part is never the no itself, but the time right after where you start crafting this narrative in your head about why you weren’t good enough, why you shouldn’t have applied, or why the people who got in were obviously always going to get in. That spiral is so much more dangerous than the rejection because a rejection lasts one day and that self-deprecating mentality can last a month if you let it.

Aside from the mental struggles, there were logistical struggles too. Starting a 501(c)(3) as a high schooler meant a lot of restrictions with forms, payments, and other forms of certification that weren’t easily obtainable. Fundraising itself is brutal. Research is also a lot of trial-and-error and sometimes draining when the experimental results don’t align with my original expectation. Balancing all of it with actually being a student, and having a life, is something I’m honestly still figuring out.

We’ve been impressed with Project Pulmonary, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
The organization that I founded is called Project Pulmonary, a 501(c)(3) public health nonprofit organization focused on lung cancer prevention in firefighters, but more specifically focused on providing pulmonary rehabilitation to the people who are chronically exposed to wildfire carcinogens. When a firefighter walks into a burning structure or works a wildfire line, they’re breathing in VOCs, PAHs, benzene, all of it, over and over across a career. So our work is about intervening in that carcinogenic burden before it turns into a diagnosis rather than after.

Around Southern California, I’ve become somewhat known as the student who is extremely passionate about helping firefighters and doing all things lung cancer related. I’ve been featured on KTLA, Fox News, CBS, and Spectrum News, and I’ve also spoken at the U.S. Capitol. I think what I’m most known for, though, is being unreasonably passionate about this and being pretty good at convincing people twice my height to invest in something a high schooler started.

If I had to name what actually sets us apart, aside from the name, it’s that we work on a problem people can’t actually see. Nobody looks at a firefighter and thinks about lung cancer. They think about their bravery, and they should, because that part is most definitely true. But that image is also where most people’s imagination stops. We can picture a burn. We can picture someone carried out of a building. What we can’t picture is what’s happening in someone’s airways after fifteen years of inhaling VOCs and PAHs and benzene, because there’s no photograph of that. Mucociliary clearance breaking down doesn’t make the news. A diagnosis at 52 from exposures that started at 27 has no visual, and by the time it does, it’s a chart in an oncologist’s office. That is why what Project Pulmonary does is so significant.

Brand wise, I’m proudest of two things. The first is that we’ve secured over $35,000 in funding for detoxification saunas, which are one of the most direct interventions we can put in a station as high schoolers. The second, and honestly the one that gets me, is the stories. Firefighters from around the world have reached out to tell us what this project has meant to them personally. We’ve now reached the point where departments contact us asking for help with funding. This started as a small student-led project, and now people who’ve been doing this work for twenty years are asking us for support.

For the readers, what I’d say is this. Find a way to make an impact in your own community, whatever that looks like for you. If you want to do it with us, we’re always looking for volunteers, partners, and corporate sponsors for monetary investment to keep expanding what we can put directly into stations. So please reach out to us @projectpulmonary on Instagram!

What does success mean to you?
Success itself may not be an ambiguous term, but I’d define it as whether something outlives me. I’ve won awards I’m proud of, but a trophy sits on a shelf and a sauna sits in a fire station where somebody uses it after every shift for the next twenty years. That’s the difference. I don’t measure this in headlines or grant totals, but whether a firefighter who’s been doing this since before I was born picks up the phone and asks us for help because that means we built something real enough to be worth trusting. Success is a problem people couldn’t see becoming one they can’t ignore. It’s a kid reading my book and understanding what cigarette smoke does to the lungs. And selfishly, it’s knowing that if I disappeared tomorrow, Project Pulmonary would keep going and continue on the legacy of protecting firefighters from lung cancer.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://projectpulmonary.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/projectpulmonary/