Howard Co. Student Receives $25K For Science Project

ELLICOTT CITY, MD — Out of 1,993 high school seniors, one from Howard County was selected as a finalist in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the nation's oldest science and math competition for high school seniors. Only 40 finalists were chosen, including Nadine Meister of Centennial High School.

As a finalist, Meister will receive $25,000 and travel to Washington, D.C. from March 5-11, where all finalists will undergo a judging process by leading scientists and compete for more than $1.8 million in awards. The top 10 awards, which will be announced at a black-tie gala awards ceremony at the National Building Museum on March 10, range from $40,000 to $250,000.

Finalists’ projects span a diversity of STEM-related topics including targeting cancer via signaling pathways, developing a mobile application for stroke diagnosis using deep learning and computer vision and identifying an improved method for trace level arsenic quantification in water.

Meister's project title is "Cooperative Relaxation in Supercooled Liquids: Kadanoff's Block Construction and Wilson's Renormalization Group Transformation." In summary, she modeled the theoretical chemistry of glasslike materials, which are supercooled liquids called “metallic glasses. Her approach provided new insights on how the physical and thermodynamic properties of these materials relate to one another.