🇺🇸 Mike Wimmer

Two graduations, one week apart

On May 21, 2021, at a ceremony held at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Mike Wimmer received an associate degree from Rowan-Cabarrus Community College with a 4.0 grade-point average. On May 28 he graduated from Concord Academy, a private school in Concord, North Carolina, as valedictorian with a GPA of 5.45. He was 12.

He had compressed the last two years of high school and two years of college into one pandemic year of dual enrollment. “With COVID, of course being locked in, I figured out, hey, might as well take some more classes, right?” he told FOX. His own explanation of the speed was simpler still: “Because I can take in knowledge instantly, I can actually get through each class faster than the normal pace.”

He is not to be confused with Mike Wimmer the American illustrator, a different person with the same name.

“He is not gifted; he is profoundly gifted”

The signs came early. At two, his mother noticed, he was writing his full name in sidewalk chalk; at 18 months he was using a stylus on an iPad to learn letters and the U.S. states, then wondering how the iPad worked. When the family tried to enroll him in pre-kindergarten early, he was refused. The psychologist who tested him, his parents told the Salisbury Post, “maxed her test out” and told them: “He is not gifted; he is profoundly gifted.”

The day after the testing, the psychologist phoned with an IQ number she said was not correct, because he had exceeded everything her test could measure. His parents have never published it — and, they have said, have never told Mike. He joined Mensa at four. At seven he attended the first of three summer programs at MIT, where the registrar assumed his age on the form was a typo for 17. At ten he went straight from fifth grade to ninth.

A robot named Infinite

At seven he founded Next Era Innovations to build software for the NAO humanoid robot. He named his own robot Infinite, “because his possibilities are infinite,” and wrote an app for it that quizzes autistic students on six emotions. By ten he had trained a machine-learning model to recognize toy cars and built a semi-autonomous RC Corvette on a Raspberry Pi, and The Robot Report profiled him at the Robotics Summit & Expo.

The work drew attention from an unlikely client. Mike has said he began working with U.S. Special Operations Command at ten; he received the command’s science-and-technology challenge coins in 2019 and 2020. The disbelief was part of the story. “Who’s the kid, and why are they hiring the kid?” was how he described the reaction to FOX8.

A bachelor’s degree at 14, a doctorate at 16

After the double graduation he enrolled at Carolina University, a small private Christian university in Winston-Salem. In May 2023, at 14, he graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. “It was pretty easy,” he said. “Especially since it was computer science. I had already taught myself pretty much everything the degree had taught me.” Around the same time, he told FOX, he had just finished driver’s education.

Master’s degrees in data science and business administration followed, and on May 3, 2025, at 16, he received a PhD in Innovation from the same university. Carolina University describes the program as one that integrates business, technology, social sciences and engineering to study innovation in organizations and society. The university also said he was the youngest person to receive a PhD in the United States — a claim no independent body has verified.

Lionfish, Pokémon cards and three companies

His most visible project targets an invasive species. Working with a team in Bermuda, he built ALFREDD, an artificial-intelligence system that detects lionfish, which he says is 99 percent accurate. At his PhD ceremony he unveiled ReefSweeper, an underwater remotely operated vehicle that identifies, kills and collects lionfish, then returns to the surface to offload them. His mother put the mission in family terms: “you got to save Dory, right?”

Alongside Next Era Innovations he runs Reflect Social, which links social media with smart-home devices, and Insta Grade AI, which uses AI to value Pokémon cards. No revenue, funding or valuation figures for any of the companies have been published.

Where is Mike Wimmer now?

The latest detailed reports, from May 2025, covered his PhD ceremony, where he unveiled ReefSweeper — the lionfish robot that grew out of his work with Atlantic Lionshare in Bermuda — and described him as running three companies. His YouTube channel now carries the name Dr. Mike Wimmer. No later news coverage has been found.

Born in September 2008, he turns 18 in September 2026. His plans after the doctorate were, by his own account, age-appropriate: “I’m still 16, so I’m going to have time by the pool, do normal 16-year-old stuff.” His father’s description of the whole journey remains the most accurate: “He’s just moving along at a really comfortable pace and it just happens to be way faster than the normal pace.”