Two Ossining Students Earn Spots in National Science Competition

Ossining High School senior Caroline Reed placed first in the Upstate Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, which took place online last week, and will participate in the 58th national competition with her research on minke whales.

Classmate Alexandra Hoffman took fourth place overall for her biomedical research project on acute myeloid leukemia and will also advance to the national competition. The Upstate JSHS selected the top five students overall from all categories: biomedical; biochemistry; behavioral studies; general biology; and physical, computational mathematics.

“What an amazing accomplishment by these two young scientists, particularly in these unusual and troubling times,” said Angelo Piccirillo, who co-teaches the three-year Science Research Program with Valerie Holmes.

The national JSHS will take place April 15-17 as a virtual competition. The symposium brings together 230 high school students who qualified by submitting and presenting original scientific research papers in regional symposia.

A third student in the Science Research Program, Hammad Hassan, earned third place in the biomedical category on the first day of the upstate symposium for his research on B cell cancers.

Caroline said she presented her research to five judges during a Zoom meeting on Thursday. “I’m so happy. I’m in shock. I’m reeling,” she said after learning she won the competition and a $2,000 award.

Her research involved passive acoustics monitoring of North Atlantic minke whales, which are the smallest of the baleen whales. Passive monitoring involves the use of an underwater microphone to detect and monitor marine mammals.

“Passive acoustics monitoring is great because it means we don’t need to go down deep into the ocean,” she said, adding that a downside is boat noises can cover up some of the vocalization.

Caroline created an algorithm that cuts the vocalizations into pieces, thus increasing the ability of scientists to distinguish the minke whale vocalizations – which sound like heartbeats – from boat noises. To create the signal processor, she reached out to experts at IBM, who allowed her to adapt their open source code algorithm used for recognizing patterns of human speech. “I changed it to better suit what I was going to do,” she said, adding that it has an overall accuracy rate of more than 90 percent.

She worked to collect data with her mentor, Genevieve Davis, senior acoustician with the Northeast Fisheries Science Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Ms. Davis, who studies humpback whales, collected passive acoustics data from a site in the Caribbean and another off the southeastern coast of the United States.

“It was really exciting for all of us because we have this tool that with a little bit of tweaking, we can apply to all different animals,” Caroline said.

Caroline fell in love with the study of whales and marine science when she attended a special camp after her freshman year at OHS. However, the experience was “tinged with an impending sense of doom” for the future survival of the marine mammals. A number of whale species are endangered, largely due to commercial fishing.

“Minke whales are not endangered right now but because they’re not endangered, everyone is killing them and I think that’s going to be a problem very soon,” she said.

“The strategy that I’ve created is what’s really important here and hopefully it’s able to be used by researchers in all different bioacoustics disciplines,” said Caroline, who plans to study the environment in college and pursue a career in the environmental protection field.

For her part, Alexandra used genetic engineering to induce mutations of acute myeloid leukemia in an intentional, controlled series. AML, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow, is caused by a sequence of mutations, but how the mutations relate to one another is largely unknown. Providing a new mouse model in which the mouse develops the cancer through a specific series of mutations will allow scientists to develop accurate cures more quickly.

After creating the improved mouse model, Alexandra used it to run experiments investigating which mutations in which order caused the most severe AML developments. She determined that one particular order – Tet2 loss of function, followed by Npm1 alteration – led to more severe symptom development than the reverse order.

“Indicating that the order of mutations is a critical factor in disease development is a game-changer for science’s understanding or why and how this cancer occurs,” Alexandra wrote in a summary of her research.

Alexandra is hoping her model will help give researchers a better understanding of mutations as a whole in AML and provide another platform for testing new drugs and treatment therapies.

Alexandra became interested in research and possible cures for cancer after her grandfather died of pancreatic cancer when she was 7. After choosing AML for her science research project at OHS, she interviewed with Dr. Ross Levine of the Levine Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, who invited her to conduct research there during the summers after her sophomore and junior years. Her first step was building genetic delivery mechanisms, and the second was using those mechanisms for lab work with mice.

Researchers in the Levine Lab are testing various new models and different mutations, she said. They plan to publish her work along with their research this fall.

“I really enjoyed being in a lab and having this opportunity,” said Alexandra, who will begin biomedical engineering studies at Duke University this fall.