5 UES High Schoolers Win National Science, Math Prizes

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Five students at Upper East Side high schools are among the 300 students announced as "scholars" in a prestigious annual math and science competition.

Each of the 300 scholars in the Regeneron Science Talent Search receives a $2,000 award, plus another $2,000 which goes to their school. The competition, held since 1942, calls itself "the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors.

The prize-winning Upper East Side seniors are:

• Jaeah Kim, Hunter College High School (Project Title: Save Our Sons: Exploring RNAi- Mediated Intragenomic Conflict in D. sim Through Genetic Sex-Ratio Assays)
• Neha Mani, Hunter College High School (Project Title: Distinguishing Bacterial Motion Quantitatively: A Diagnostic Method for Intestinal Disease)
• Krupa Sekhar, Hunter College High School (Project Title: Discovering Population-Specific Epigenetic Markers for Pancreatic Cancer Through Examination of Chromatin Accessibility)
• William Hu, Hunter College High School (Project Title: Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Sequence Dependent Nucleosome Core Particles Unwrapping)
• Emma Yang, The Brearley School (Project Title: Designing a Synthetic Neural Network Layer for Image Classification)

The 300 scholars were selected from 1,760 applicants from 611 schools across 45 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and 10 countries, according to a news release.

Scholars were chosen "based on their exceptional research skills, commitment to academics, innovating thinking and promise as scientists," according to a news release.

The competition isn't over yet — on Jan. 21, 40 of the 300 scholars will be named finalists, making them eligible to compete for more than $1.8 million in awards.

Alumni of the coveted science and math honors have won 13 Nobel Prizes, 11 National Medals of Science, 21 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships and two Fields Medals, according to the Society for Science & The Public, which runs the competition along with Regeneron, a biotechnology company.

Patch reporter Gus Saltonstall contributed.