Port Washington Area Students Named Regeneron Science Scholars

PORT WASHINGTON, NY—Three dozen Long Island students have been named 2020 Regeneron Science Talent Search Scholars, the nation's oldest and most prestigious pre-college science competition.

They are among 300 students named Regeneron STS scholars and hope to be among 40 finalists named later this month. The scholars were selected based on their exceptional research skills, commitment to academics, innovative thinking and promise as scientists.

These students were selected from 1,993 U.S. and international entries, and they each will receive a $2,000 award with an additional $2,000 going to the high school to support STEM education.

The 36 Long Island students represent 12 percent of the overall scholars. Of that number, two students hail from Port Washington. They are:

• Priya Chainani, Paul D. Schreiber High School, Port Washington: The Predictability of U.S. Drug Deaths Through State Level Income Inequality and Neuroticism.
• Jaime Levin, Paul D. Schreiber High School, Port Washington: Categorizing geocoded anti-vaccination tweets in urban areas using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and dictionary-based modeling.

Four students in Manhasset also received the honor. They are:

• Ella Wesson, Manhasset High School, Manhasset: Engineering One Layer of a Two-Dimensional Acoustic Band Gap Material and Reconstructing the Sound Pressure Field Using Acoustic Holography.
• Kevin Carratu, Manhasset High School, Manhasset: Supplementation of Antioxidants with Curcumin, Quercetin, and L-glutathione to Reduce Dopaminergic Neurodegeneration, Alpha-synuclein Accumulation, and Decreased Motility Associated with Parkinson's in Caenorhabditis elegans.
• Elizabeth Wu, Manhasset High School, Manhasset: Developing Algorithmic Machinery to Explore the Cosmological Horizon Problem by Numerically Solving Maxwell's Equations in the Kasner Metric.
• Kevin Gauld, Manhasset High School, Manhasset: Optimizing Neural Image Classifiers Through the Usage of Neural Style Transfer in Image Preprocessing.

Three students in Roslyn Heights also received the honor. They are:

• William Borges, Roslyn High School, Roslyn Heights: An Innovative Approach to Recover Nitrogen from Wastewater Using Nanostructured Cellulose Sulfate.
• Andrew Goldberg, Roslyn High School, Roslyn Heights: Compression of Intrinsic Neural Timescale in Schizophrenia.
• Jake Stoller, Roslyn High School, Roslyn Heights: Examining the Effects of Decitabine on the Efficacy of DS-3032b in Dedifferentiated Liposarcoma.

"We are thrilled to recognize and honor these students for the many contributions they are making to the STEM community and our broader society. With such a wide array of interests and high-quality work, we are eager to follow their progress in the years to come," said Hala Mirza, senior vice president of corporate communications and citizenship at Regeneron.

The 40 finalists in the competition, to be named on Jan. 22, will travel to Washington, D.C., where they will undergo a rigorous judging process, interact with leading scientists, display their research for the public, meet with national leaders, and compete for more than $1.8 million in awards provided by Regeneron.