Seniors honored in national science competition

Among 4,428 applicants who submitted 1,780 research reports or engineering projects for the annual Siemens competition, seniors Agastya Gupta and Deepti Kannan were named among the 300 semifinalists.

According to its website, the national Siemens competition is “a science research competition for high school students [that] seeks to promote excellence by encouraging students.”

In addition, Gupta’s was also one of the 60 reports that then advanced to regional finals; these winners were announced on Oct. 20 and were rewarded with $1,000 scholarships and bronze medals. For the regional competition, Gupta delivered a poster presentation about his project on Nov. 7-8 at the California Institute of Technology, where he competed against four other individuals in the region.

Although Gupta did not advance to nationals, the winner, Ruchi Pandya from Lynbrook High School, will receive a $3,000 scholarship and travel  to Washington, D.C., to compete at the national level on Dec. 5-8.

“This competition was a pretty big deal for me,” Gupta said. “[I] had to submit an 18-page paper and put in a lot of work, so it was really exciting to become a finalist.”

Gupta created a computer vision algorithm, a software that recognizes images and patterns to identify the jugular venous pulse, which is a common symptom of heart disease. His goal was to make a mobile health solution for this diagnosis, which, with his project, could now be conducted with a simple video of the patient’s neck instead of with an expensive, bulky ultrasound machine or by a skilled specialist.

In previous years, Gupta has participated in the Synopsys Science Fair, California State Science Fair and BioGENEius Competition.

“[These science fairs] are all really exciting because you see a lot of new ideas, meet a lot of new people and get a lot of interesting questions about your work,” he said.

Kannan investigated the effects of stellar companions on the formation of planets outside the Solar System. The Kepler mission, launched by NASA in March of 2009, discovered several planets that are much closer to their host stars than Mercury is to our sun, challenging current theories of planetary formation.

Kannan looked at the theory that companion stars that are gravitationally bound to such planetary systems could cause these planets to migrate inward.

“It felt really good [to be a semifinalist],” she said. “Siemens taught me a lot about the research process and I learned so many new things about astrophysics, a field I did not know too much about before working on the project.”

This past summer, Kannan participated in the 10-week Science Internship Program at UC Santa Cruz, where she conducted her research using the telescope at Lick Observatory. Though Kannan had not entered a national science fair or competition before Siemens, she interned at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in a molecular biology lab the summer after her sophomore year.

“I’m really glad [that I was recognized for my work], but it was more about the experience than the honor,” Kannan said. “There’s a lot of different factors that go into writing a paper and the learning process helped me realize my passion for scientific research. It was really rewarding to get exposure to how science is done in the real world.”