Max Bernstein in a recent photo. (Courtesy of Alex Bernstein)

Max Bernstein, an undergraduate alum of the class of 2019 who graduated from the Computer Science master’s program in May, died July 10 at the age of 24.

Max was a Creve Coeur, Mo., local who was involved in the University’s water polo team, pre-medical professional fraternity and multiple research endeavors. Professors, family members and teammates remember him as a selfless leader who went out of his way to make the world better for others. 

Max had a good sense of what he wanted to do professionally even before starting at the University in 2015. Both of his parents are physicians, and he wanted to go into medicine to help people. In high school he had applied to a St. Louis program that accepted students automatically into a medical school, his brother Alex said, but he did not get in. Some people told him to apply again the next year, but he instead chose to come to Wash. U. 

“He resonated with the Wash. U. community,” said computer science professor Ron Cytron, who taught Max and advised his computer science master’s project. Max was not interested in competition outside of water polo and always wanted to see his classmates do well, Cytron said, noting that Max’s empathy was particularly evident in his work as a teaching assistant for beginner computer science classes. The classes relied heavily on group work, and Max drew on his past experiences to help students succeed. “He was really good at identifying where people are and he would say ‘Oh, I remember, that was a particularly hard topic for me, too,’ and he would go on to help people understand the stuff,” Cytron said.

His peers saw that dedication to serving others, too. During his freshman year on the water polo team in the fall of 2018, current senior Avery Fredman often consulted Max to ask for advice about going into medicine. Even though Max was three years older and already had many friends on the team, Fredman said Max often took the time to guide or console him. “I don’t think he would say it himself, but he definitely embodied those characteristics that a lot of pre-meds do strive and should strive to be,” he said. 

After Fredman struggled in his first water polo game on the Wash. U. team, he said he was afraid that Max would reprimand him. “I was honestly a little intimidated when I first met him, knowing all the stories about this guy—he’s super good at polo, knows what he’s doing,” he said. Instead, Max’s reaction was purely positive: “The first thing he said was, ‘Fantastic game, that was awesome to see you play. Here’s some suggestions I have for the future.’” Fredman said Max did not utter a single mean word, even if it would have been warranted.

By that point, Max had long established himself as a dominant water polo player; when it came to the sport, his reputation preceded him. He and Alex had done lots of swimming when they were younger, so when he found out that there was a water polo team at his middle school, Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School (MICDS), he was hooked.

Future Wash. U. teammate Amar Karahodzic was often tasked with guarding Max when their St. Louis high school teams competed. He usually found himself struggling to escape Max’s underwater grasp. “There’s a move in water polo called a turn, where you basically spin a guy like a top to get position on him. It’s really bad if that happens to you, and the amount of times Max did that to me, I don’t even want to think about it,” Karahodzic said. “He was just disgustingly good at water polo.”

But what impressed Karahodzic even more was the way Max handled himself with his younger teammates. The MICDS team had many inexperienced players by the time Max was a senior in high school there and there were high expectations—the school had a history of having a good program. Yet in the conversations Karahodzic overheard from feet away in the pool, Max was always encouraging and soothing others while still pushing them to win. “Playing against him, I could tell that he was somebody who would build his teammates up a lot,” Karahodzic said.

That continued at Wash. U. The team did not have a coach during Max’s senior year, so he stepped into the role, finding ways to make strength conditioning bearable, filing paperwork and organizing tournament travel. Still, even as Max kept the team’s logistics in check, swam for at least seven hours every week and balanced classes with research jobs, he knew how to have fun. Once Max had finished leading a grueling practice, Fredman said, he could “easily flip the switch.” 

He loved to take the team to Mexican restaurants like Mi Ranchito or Mission Taco, or to explore restaurants in new cities when the team traveled, and he and Alex had long enjoyed skiing together. As Max progressed in computer science, the brothers talked more often about technology together, and when Max visited Alex in California in the late winter they baked the same toffee chocolate chip cookies multiple times. Max was looking forward to the start of the St. Louis Major League Soccer team and excited to show him around new St. Louis restaurants, Alex said. 

Even professors picked up on Max’s ability to balance work and life. “He struck me as a very kind of renaissance kind of guy: a fierce competitor in water polo and an incredible scientist and intellect to boot,” Cytron said. After seeing Max’s success as a TA and in other classes, Cytron advised Max’s project for the computer science master’s project, which used data from education management service Canvas to predict student success and help support struggling students. The project was supposed to take just one year and be completed in the spring of 2020, but the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic swiftly changed things. Max was undeterred. “He was interested in doing a really fine job with it, so he was happy to keep working on it,” Cytron said.

At one point during the master’s project research, there was a moment when Max discovered a flaw in the Canvas data—he had mistakenly included a set of incomplete records in the data analysis. But he kept going. “He wasn’t the least bit set back by this,” Cytron said. “To his credit as a scientist, he faced it right away and said ‘Look, we have to redo all of this.’ And he did.”

Even those who did not get to know Max too well shared sentiments. Engineering professor Michael Brent, for whom Max worked as a teaching assistant in Algorithms for Computational Biology, praised Max’s contributions to the course. “He was an excellent and very conscientious TA who was a pleasure to interact with,” Brent wrote in an email to Student Life. 

Max’s work and impact extended beyond the Danforth Campus. Manish Boolchandani was a doctoral student at the Dantas Lab when Max joined him there in 2017. At first, Max did not have much experience in the coding tactics necessary for the computational biology work that interested him, but he was “a quick learner,” Boolchandani said. Max always came to lab meetings thoroughly prepared and often spent hours learning on his own to hone the skills he used at the lab. Even though Boolchandani was Max’s mentor, he said it often felt as if the two were simply colleagues, working side by side to solve tough problems. 

The Bernstein family has established a scholarship, the Max Bernstein Memorial Endowed Scholarship, to support future students whose interests, like Max’s, bridge engineering and medicine. Cytron said he appreciated the family’s choice to designate the scholarship specifically for that purpose. “I was really touched that they thought to set up the scholarship to help other people just like Max accomplish those kinds of goals,” he said. 

Max’s legacy will continue on in other ways as well. Karahodzic, who still coaches club water polo in St. Louis, said that even though Max had not played high school-level water polo for six years, high schoolers still tell stories about his dominance.

What sticks with Karahodzic the most, however, is not Max’s water polo prowess nor the time they shared outside the pool. It is the memory of Max’s smile and laughter, which reminded him of a gleefully mischievous toddler. “It was the most contagious thing I’ve ever seen,” Karahodzic said.

That smile will be just one of the many things future Wash. U. computer science students will hear about Max, as Cytron said he looks forward to carrying on his legacy with future advisees. “I just can’t wait to tell them all about Max,” he said. 

People can make gifts to the Max Bernstein Memorial Endowed Scholarship by going to gifts.wustl.edu and entering “Max Bernstein Memorial Scholarship” in the text box for gift donations or sending a check in the mail to Washington University, McKelvey Engineering, c/o Becky Pitzer, 7425 Forsyth Blvd, Suite 2555, St. Louis, MO 63105.