Don’t Believe in Science? These Winning Local Teens Sure Do

The winners of a nationwide search for the best young science talents have been announced, and high schools in Belmont, Cupertino and Palo Alto are being represented.

Sponsored by biotech company Regeneron and coordinated by the Society for Science and the Public, it’s the oldest science and math competition in the United States for high school seniors.

The announced 202 winners and their schools will be awarded $2,000 each. From that pool, 40 finalists will be invited to Washington, D.C. in March to present their projects and vie for a top award of $250,000.

Among them are Selena Sun, 18, from Belmont’s Carlmont High, for her work on rehabilitating brain-inured patients in sub-Saharan Africa.

From Cupertino’s Monte Vista High, Ashvin Irrinki, 17, for his work with synergetic prosthesis; Gautham Raghupathi, 18, for a project titled “New Punctate Clathrin-Mediated Endocytosis Events Detected in 4D Super-Resolution Lattice Light-Sheet Microscopy Data via a Novel Deep Learning Pipeline Applicable to Numerous Puncta Segmentation Tasks”; and Iris Xia, 17, for her work studying supermassive black holes and “anomalous responses of high-ionization emission lines in active galactic nuclei to continuum variability.”

Representing Palo Alto High are Ashley Guo, 18, for her work with metabolic regulation in neuronal morphogenesis; and Ivory Tang, 17, whose project is “Enhancing ferromagnetism and tuning magnetic anisotropy utilizing spin-orbit interaction.”