By Tanushri Shah
(Toms
River, NJ—March 30, 2017) On Thursday, March 30th, and Friday, March
31st, High Tech Students visited Ocean County College for the First
Annual South Jersey Junior Science Symposium, announced Dr. Joseph Giammarella,
Principal of High Tech High School.
Students presented more than sixty
research projects from STEM fields at the Junior Science Symposium. On the morning of Thursday, March 30, 2017,
Shelina Chotrani of Secaucus, North Bergen resident Jeel Shah, and Muhammad
Umar of Bayonne, all presenters at the general poster session, and North Bergen
resident Tanushri Shah, an observer, attended several interesting, intellectual
oral presentations. Afterward, the general
poster presentations took place.
Umar won second place and Shah won
third place in the “Life Sciences & Biology” category. Other activities included “Electrostatic
Sword Tournaments,” trivia, and puzzles.
Some attendees accepted invitations to
an evening banquet at the Clarion Hotel, where many students, like Maya
Ravichandran, won $150 for winning the Student Choice Awards and a $200
environmental scholarship. Ravichandran collaborated with Princeton University
to research environmentally-sustainable concrete.
On the last day, final oral presenters wrapped
up their presentations. For example,
seventeen year-old Indrani Das worked on “Exosomal microRNA-14a: Mechanistic Reactive Astrocyte Repair in Brain
Injury In vitro.” Das won the
Junior Nobel Prize for her pioneering research in brain injury and disease, and
earned a well-deserved $250,000. Das
discovered a method of increasing the survival rate of neurons after brain
injuries.
