The Regeneron Science Prize, known as the “Junior Nobel Prize”, was recently announced. The prize has a long history and was awarded to Chinese biochemist and Nobel Prize winner Yongjian Qian.
What are American high school students doing in research?
Recently, the Regeneron Science Prize, the most prestigious and oldest STEM competition for high school students in the U.S., was announced. 1,760 high school students (seniors) from across the U.S. entered the competition with complete experiments and reports they had completed independently, covering math, computer science, biology, chemistry, Medicine, environmental science, engineering, materials science, and other fields. The finalists, 40 of whom were finalists, competed for a total of more than $1.8 million in prizes.
This year’s Science Genius Award honors student research in infinite matching algorithms, machine learning to evaluate new drugs and water filtration.
Top 10 Junior Nobel Prize
The first prize of $250,000 went to Yunseo Choi from Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the nation’s top high schools, for her research project on playing theoretical “matchmaker” for an infinite number of things or people. The project investigates matching algorithms for finite dyads and determines which important properties still apply to infinite dyads. Matching theory has many real-Life applications, including matching organ donors with recipients, assigning medical school applicants to rotations, and matching potential CPs in dating apps.
Second place went to Noah Getz, with a $175,000 prize, from Bronx Science (which is best known for its math and science disciplines and has produced eight Nobel Prize winners and eight Pulitzer Prize winners), for his research adapting a computer model to identify promising drug compounds, which could accelerate the discovery of new drugs at a lower cost. This approach treats classification as an information retrieval task, similar to ranking results in a browser search. In conducting the model tests, Getz found two drugs that significantly reduced levels of inflammatory markers associated with Alzheimer’s disease and new crowns.
Third place, with a $150,000 prize, went to Eshani Jha, from Lynbrook High School, a public high school in San Jose, California, who developed a biochar filtration system that removes plastic particles, pharmaceuticals, pesticides and heavy metals (such as arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury) from drinking water. Biochar has similar properties to charcoal, but is more sustainable and less expensive because it can be derived from biological waste. jha has found that its effectiveness can be increased by increasing its surface area and carbon content, and by adding certain chemical modifications to improve its ability to sequester contaminants. And this filter costs less than a dollar a month.
Fourth place went to Gopal Goel, of Krishma High School in Portland, who won the $100,000 prize for his mathematical research linking two disciplines on randomness and probability. Previous studies have shown that the connection exists, but Gopal noted that the connection is much more general in nature. He believes his work will be useful to researchers in nuclear physics, quantum field theory and meteorology, and hopes to help in the search for the true nature of quantum gravity, better known as the “theory of everything.
Fifth place went to Timothy Qian (Qian Chenglei), a $90,000 award winner from Montgomery Blair High School, for his work on how quantum mechanics can be used to improve the accuracy of measurements of physical quantities such as electric or magnetic fields, and to achieve optimal measurements of field properties, which can be used in fields such as nanoscale MRI in medicine and chemistry.
Sixth place went to Vetri Vel, with an $80,000 prize, from Bangor High School in Maine, who designed a deep learning system with a hands-free detection system that distinguishes between different images to identify fallen people with an average accuracy of 98%. He began his project after a neighbor collapsed alone in his Home. Falls are the leading cause of fatal injuries in the elderly.
Seventh place went to Alay Shah of Plano West Senior HIgh School, who received a $70,000 prize for developing a diagnostic tool that identifies neurological disorders by tracking eye movements and hopes the tool will be a low-cost alternative to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In clinical trials with patients with Parkinson’s, dementia, multiple sclerosis and ADHD, Alay discovered unique eye patterns associated with each disease.
Eighth place went to Wenjun Hou (Hou Wenjun), from Jesuit High School, who won a $60,000 prize. He used quantum computing to solve the well-known “knapsack problem” in computer science by not only writing his own new quantum algorithm, but also designing quantum hardware for the central component of his algorithm, which has never been done before. This has never been done before.
Ninth place winner was Vivian Yee of International Academy, who received a $50,000 prize for her study of inequalities in transmission and infection in New York City boroughs, using modeling of transmission, cure, and mortality rates, and integrating housing, Education, and employment status to find that transmission and mortality rates are higher in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Her findings have been incorporated into the Congressional Coronavirus Task Force’s Consensus Memorandum, which is expected to guide future public health policy development. It is expected to guide future public health policy development.
Tenth place went to Sam Christian of the Liberal Arts and Science Academy in Austin, who received a $40,000 prize. The prize was awarded to him for finding and observing the motion of planets in 69 wide binary systems, which are binary systems separated by one light year, from numerous observatories and NASA’s TESS telescope. He noted that the orbits of these exoplanets are largely consistent with the orbits of their binary systems. His findings, when applied to a larger sample, may shed further light on how planets form and evolve.
In addition to the top 10 finishers, the remaining 30 contestants will all receive $25,000.
Winning Chinese-American student gets early admission to Harvard
Of this year’s 40 winners, 16, or 40 percent, are of Chinese descent, continuing the traditional strength of Asians in exams and competitions.
One of the winners, Jessica Zhang (Chinese name: 张济杭), has been granted early admission to Harvard University.
Her research topic is “Classification of Tight Contact Structures on a Solid Torus”.
Jihang Zhang attends Proof School, a small private school in San Francisco that focuses on mathematics education. She is currently a 12th grader and will be graduating this year. She said that the school is very small, with only 11 students in a whole grade. Because the school usually focuses on math education, it usually has math classes throughout the afternoon and other science, literature and history classes in the morning.
It is understood that because this high school is known for its math education, when applying, students do not necessarily have to be good at math, but the school will want students who enroll to love math.
Her Parents were chemistry majors at Peking University and stayed after studying in the United States and coming to work in the Bay Area.
Historic Science Genius Award, won by Yongjian Qian
The Science Genius Awards, a program of the non-profit organization Society for Science & the Public, is the oldest science competition for high school students in the United States, with a history of 76 years.
The Science Genius Award is known as the “Junior Nobel Prize” and has produced 13 Nobel Prizes, 13 National Medals of Science, six Breakthrough Prizes, 22 MacArthur Foundation Scholarships and two Fields Medal winners.
According to the survey, in the past two years more than 500 semi-finalists, 50-57% of the finalists ended up in the “HAYES” five schools, 70-76% of the top 15 schools in the United States.
Earlier, the Scientific Genius Awards were divided into Basic Research, Global Good and “The top three students in each of the three areas were awarded prizes ranging from $250,000 to $150,000. Since 2017, Regenerative Element Pharmaceuticals has become the third largest sponsor of this award for ten years, and put out $100 million as prize money, Regenerative Element eliminated the previous classification and replaced it with 40 finalists to take the top ten, the top three in turn issued $250,000 yuan, $175,000, $150,000 prize money; the fourth place was awarded $100,000, after which the prize money decreases by $10,000 in ranking.
In 1942 Westinghouse (Westinghouse) became the first title sponsor of the competition, Intel took over in 1988, until September 2015 announced the cessation of sponsorship, and in May 2016 regenerative element pharmaceuticals took over.
President George H.W. Bush Sr. once described the Intel Science Prize as “the Super Bowl of science. Many famous scientists have won the award, including Rod Hoffman, David Mumford, Sheldon Grashaw, Walter Gilbert, Yongjian Qian, and others.
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