5 Chatham High School Students Recognized In State Competitions

Chatham NJ

02 May, 2022

11:24 AM

Description

CHATHAM, NJ — Five students in Chatham High School's research club successfully presented their projects at several state competitions. Read more in the news release below from Chatham High School. Five Chatham High School researchers from the CHS Research Club successfully presented their projects at the state competitions, the North Jersey Regional Science Fair (NJRSF) and the North Jersey Junior Science and Humanities Symposium (NJ JSHS). Dr. Yelena Naumova, CHS Science teacher, is the advisor to the Research Club, which facilitates and supports independent student research. Stephen Andrews, a CHS senior, Co-President of the Research Club, and four year competitor, won the top NJRSF award and an award for participation in the 2020 International Science and Engineering Fair for his project titled "Automatic Speed Tracking Tool for Amateur Sports." He also won the Four-Year NJRSF Participation Award. Stephen is CHS's "most decorated" researcher. He competed for four years. Two of his projects are about soccer. Stephen is also a published author. He published an article in a peer-reviewed technical journal on one of his projects. Stephen said, "I've always had a passion for soccer and math, so I knew I wanted my research project to combine the two topics. When I came across the topic of sports analytics, it gave me the freedom to choose the balance of how much soccer and how much math I wanted in my project. This was perfect to get me started with my research for my first project. After completing my soccer project, I wanted to do something a bit more technical. The optimization problem faced by shipping companies like Amazon was interesting to me, so modeling the problem within graph theory led me to my second project." Stephen plans to attend MIT in the fall to study mathematics. Mihir Rao, a CHS senior, Co-President of the Research Club, and three-year competitor won multiple awards for his research project titled "Novel Local Radiomic Bayesian Classifiers for Non-Invasive Prediction of MGMT Methylation Status in Glioblastoma." In the New Jersey Regional Science Fair, Mihir won second place in the category Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and third place in the Cancer Research category, and he won the Association for Computing Machinery Award. In the NJ JSHS, Mihir won third place in the category Mathematics & Computer Science. Mihir started competing as a sophomore. In all of his projects, he applied AI to solve a "medical" problem, from diagnostics to development of new vaccines. Mihir also published a paper on one of his projects. Mihir explained his interest in this issue: "During my freshman year, my grandmother was diagnosed with a retinal microvascular condition called diabetic retinopathy (DR). After reading about the disease online, I quickly realized that early diagnosis is critical to effectively treating the disease, especially in countries like India where there is a high prevalence of the disease but low availability of trained ophthalmologists who can diagnose it. This problem led me to my first research project, in which I was able to successfully develop a highly-accurate computational model that uses deep learning to analyze retinal images and detect DR in its early stages." Mihir will attend Princeton in the fall, majoring in computer science with a computational biology focus. He will be on a pre-med track. Mihir commented on DR. Naumova's impact on his learning and future plans: "Dr. Naumova has DEFINITELY played a significant role in supporting all of us during our high school research journeys! I was lucky enough to have her as a teacher as well, and she has been critical in cultivating student interest in STEM at CHS, myself included." Selina Fan, a CHS senior and two-year competitor, also won multiple awards. In the NJ Regional Science Fair, she won third place in the category of Biostatistics and the Statistics 3rd place award for her project titled "The Identification of Novel Targets to Upregulate MHC-1 Molecules." Selina won second place for her project titled "Comprehensive Analysis of the Immunogenomic Landscape and Clinical Features in Cervical Cancer" in the category Biomedical Sciences at the NJ Junior Science and Humanities Symposium. Selina competed as a junior and senior. Her interests are in medical research. Selina is also a published author. When asked about her advice for future researchers, Selina said, "A piece of advice I would give on how to choose the topic for the project is to first identify the general subjects you want to explore. Then, I recommend reading scientific research articles to become more familiar with the subject and decrease the scope of the topic. The conclusion and the future research section can be very helpful because you can draw inspiration from others' unresolved questions for your research." Selina will attend Washington University in the fall. Willy Chan, a CHS senior and four-year competitor also won multiple awards at the NJ Regional Science Fair awards. Willy won second place in the category Computer Science, and he won the Association for Computing Machinery Award and the Four-Year NJRSF Participation Award. His project was titled "The Effect of Different Moral Frameworks on Reinforcement Learning Behavior and Performance within Serious Games." As a freshman, Willy built a device that measures brain waves. As a sophomore, he developed a method (device) that could be used in the cars to help drivers "see" various obstacles. His junior project was focused on transmission of small particles, such as viruses in indoor environments. Willy will be attending Stanford University in the fall to study Computer Science and Symbolic Systems. Willy reminds other student researchers, "Research doesn't have to be something super intense or professional. As long as you find a subject that inspires your curiosity, do more research into it and come up with a question to solve. Day by day, it gets easier to look more deeply into a subject that you genuinely enjoy." Ishir Rao, a CHS freshman and first-year competitor, won the NJRSF Freshman Participation Award for his project titled "Modeling and Optimization of Epidemiological Control Policies through Reinforcement Learning." In his project, Ishir modeled various epidemiological controls to minimize the spread of infectious diseases during pandemics. Ishir said, "Seeing this pandemic and its devastating impact on our community and our world, I had the idea of computationally generating pandemic control strategies that can be implemented in the real world. A control strategy consists of many restrictive measures, such as social distancing and lockdowns, and uses them in a precise order that allows for economic activity while significantly reducing the spread of infection. By generating multiple strategies, we can be better prepared to mitigate any future pandemics. To conduct this research, I had to teach myself many complex computational modeling techniques to virtually simulate a pandemic. Additionally, I had to learn to use reinforcement learning, a subset of machine learning, which allowed me to efficiently generate the control strategies. I will definitely continue doing research in the future!"