(West Long
Branch, NJ—March 19, 2015) Four High Tech High School students presented
their work at the General Poster Session at the 53rd Annual Monmouth
University Junior Science Symposium (MJSS), announced
Dr. Joseph Giammarella, Principal of High Tech.
George
Iskander of Bayonne, Kearny residents Kylie Long and Sabina Ohkawa, and Anisha
Mahat of Harrison joined Dr. Nina Lavlinskaia for the event. Iskander, a junior, solved many
science-related problems and collected a number of gifts for his effort. Ohkawa, also a junior, earned third prize for
her project in Thermochemistry, i.e., identifying the role of convection
currents in the so-called Mpemba Effect, when warmer water freezes faster than
colder water. Mahat, a senior, also
earned third place for her poster on “The Underlying Effects of Human Prostate
Cancer Cells and Mouse Osteoblasts on the Expression of Protein
Scelrostin.” She performed her
experiments as a summer scholar in Professor Woo Young Lee’s state-of-the-art lab
at Stevens Institute of Technology, where she used 2D co-culture with and
without contact and 3D co-culture, and received a special award from the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center
(ARDEC) as the runner-up for the best work in Nanotechnology. ARDEC also recognized the work of Long, also
a senior at High Tech, who suggested a novel technique for fabrication and
design of a microchannel for micromixing, very important in the field of
nanotechnology. Long worked at NJIT and
received a special award as a runner-up in Advanced Materials Science and
Manufacturing at the banquet given to students and teachers on the first day of
the Symposium.
The
two-day event (March 19th and 20th) offered presentations
from New Jersey high school students of their individual science research
project. These presentations at MJSS afforded
students the chance to report their experimentations and research to an
assembly of their peers, instructors, and other scientifically-minded
people. Judges singled out papers and
posters for special recognition.
In
addition to the MJSS, a science-based scavenger hunt saw students competing for
memorabilia, gift cards, and other prizes.
As a point of fact, General Poster Session participants may present no
more than four poster per participating school.
As
of this moment, the High Tech Science Department’s Research Team has acquired five
medals and two special ARDEC awards in two very different and difficult competitions.
