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Annie Zhang

Proud prize winners, juniors Shefali Meagher and Huxley Westemeier, along with senior Deling Chen, smile with their awards. Meagher won fourth, Westemeier and Chen won sixth and seventh in the oral presentation category.

The last ASR state science fair concluded three weeks ago with SPA taking home many awards and some students qualifying to even greater events. Located at the River Center in downtown St. Paul, the fair brought together many students from Minnesota to learn about different areas of research and compete for awards in the many fields of science.

Students who competed at the state science fair had the opportunities to win medals to signify their expertise in the field of study, or even be awarded qualifications to be able to compete in nationals. With students winning regional awards on a large scale for their schools, and some even qualifying for nationals, the ASR team left their mark.

“Most people from our ASR science class qualified for the state science fair, which was great,” said Shefali Meagher, a junior and member of ASR. “Evan and other people got the American Fischer award while we were there.”

“Evan and Deling both qualified to ISEF nationals for science and engineering, along with Maren and Huxley,” said Meagher. ISEF, a competition for students across the country put together by the society of science is one of the highest levels of scientific competition high school students can be a part of on a national level. The ISEF competition will be taking place through may 12-16 in Columbus Ohio.

“I was awarded a gold grand award, which put me into the top 5% of projects, in biology and humanity/future impact areas, and gave me the chance to go to Ohio,” said junior Evan Morris. “My research developed a scalable and noninvasive frequency dependent optogenetic system to assess changes in synaptic plasticity at various levels of neuronal firing,” said Morris. To put it in more simple terms Evan won an award for his research on plasticity. He hopes to give a new perspective on the topic of plasticity on the national level.

“You get to meet a lot of really cool people, not only students but the judges were pretty interesting,” said Inga Wing, a senior and member of ASR. “I met a lot of judges who do similar things to what I do, which was cool,” said Wing. “They also had some news channels based around the competition, which was pretty fun to see,” said Wing.

With the ISEF nationals coming up May 10-16, students who qualified will go to Columbus Ohio to try and represent their school and compete for awards at one of the most prestigious science competitions in the country.