Jericho, Garden City students honored at engineering fair
Students from Jericho High School won $10,000 and $5,000 awards at the 2022 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, the world’s largest global high school competition. Credit: Jeremy Bales
Three Nassau County high school students earned honors Friday in the 2022 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, the world’s largest global high school competition.
The students’ projects examined topics on cancer research, climate change and a way to assist the visually impaired.
Two of those honored, Rebecca Cho and Kevin Zhu, attend Jericho High School. The other, James Nagler, is a student at Garden City High School.
Cho, 17, won the Robert Horvitz Prize for Fundamental Research, which comes with a $10,000 award. The project created a geologic-climate model of western North America’s basin and range province that integrates regional tectonics — processes that affect the structure of the Earth's crust — with the effects of topography, climate, sea level and erosion.
Her model can be used to investigate the processes that have caused past changes in the region’s ecology, and potentially predict the effects of climate change on the area’s biodiversity, according to the organizers of the contest, the Society for Science.
Zhu, 17, received the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics First Award, with a prize of $5,000. Zhu’s project studied a specific type of DNA replication error to determine how prevalent they are in certain cancers, with the hope of finding better ways to diagnose and treat those cancers.
Nagler, 17, was the Embedded Systems First Award Winner, earning a prize of $5,000 for his development of a product that seeks to aid the visually impaired by providing a cheap, compact and efficient navigation system. The system primarily uses artificial intelligence, distance sensors, vibration motors, and a speaker.
Robert Sansone, 17, of Fort Pierce, Florida, won the $75,000 top award — for his research to improve the force and efficiency of synchronous reluctance motors, which are rugged, efficient, magnet-free alternatives to traditional induction motors.
For the first time since 2019, finalists competed in person. More than half of the finalists gathered this week in Atlanta at the Georgia World Congress Center, and the other finalists participated virtually. The competition featured 1,750 students representing 49 states and 63 countries, regions and territories across the world.
Joie Tyrrell is a Long Island native and covers education for Newsday, where she has worked since 1998.
