June 05, 2015

High school students capture honors

by Pete Rosenbery

CARBONDALE, Ill. -- Five high school students, including two from Carbondale Community High School, earned top honors recently at the Illinois Junior Science and Humanities Symposium at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. 

Fifty high school students from throughout the state participated in the event at SIU Carbondale, one of the 48 regional competitions nationwide sponsored by the Department of Defense and administered by the Academy of Applied Sciences.  This is the 37th year SIU hosted the event with assistance from the colleges of Science, Agricultural Sciences, and the Air Force and Army ROTCs. 

The event’s goal is to encourage scientific research at the high school level. Students presented their own original research and visited campus laboratories during their three-day visit to campus in March. Of the seven students who gave oral presentations, five finalists earned an expense-paid trip to the National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium in May in Baltimore, Md. 

The finalists, with high school and project title are: 

  • First place – Teresa Xiao, Carbondale Community High School, “Formation of Intracellular Aggregates of a-Synuclein Following Intracranial Injections of 3, 4-Dihydroxyphenylacetaldehyde (DOPAL)”
  • Second place – Chase Latour, Carbondale Community High School, “Wolf Spider (Tigrosa georgicola) as Indicators of Contaminant Subsidies from Aquatic to Terrestrial Food Webs.”
  • Third place -- Rajath Salegami, Waubonsie Valley High School, “Granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factror increases severity of multiple sclerosis (MS) in a murine model: Elucidating mechanisms of MS through histopathological analysis.”
  • Fourth place -- Dakota Linkemann, Southeastern High School, “Waste Not Want Not: Turning Agricultural Wastes into Second Generation Biofuels.”
  • Fifth place -- Brian Fitzgerald, Governor French Academy, “Data Representation with Relational document Graphs for 3D Visualization.” 

Faculty from the departments of mathematics, microbiology, physiology and plant biology participated as judges. 

The top three finalists won scholarships from the Academy of Applied Sciences to the universities of their choice in the amount of $2,000, $1,500, and $1,000 respectively. The College of Science and College of Agricultural Sciences at SIU will match this amount if the student chooses to attend SIU and major in one of those areas.