Scarsdale High School Student Advances In Science Competition

SCARSDALE, NY — Scarsdale Senior High students in the science research program participated at the Westchester-Rockland Junior Science and Humanities Symposium Saturday. It was held at John Jay High School in Lewisboro.

More than 400 students competed from Westchester and Rockland counties. The judges were scientists from academia and industry.

Scarsdale High School student Caroline Roberts won fourth place in Cellular and Molecular Biology for her PowerPoint presentation of her work entitled Proposing a Model for Regulation of Ras and Rabex-5 through Deubiquitinating Enzyme Fat-facets (faf).

Roberts examined the Ras pathway, which is an oncogenic growth pathway mutated in 30 percent of human cancers. More specifically, she was trying to determine how Fat-facets (faf) interacts with the Ras pathway with the hopes that a better understanding of this pathway will lead to deeper insights into cancer and perhaps future treatments, said SHS teacher Dylan Prendergast.

She heads next to the Upstate New York JSHS March 25-26, where she will present a poster on her work, Prendergast.

"In March, I will be taking a group of our students up to SUNY Albany to observe at the competition and support Caroline when she competes," he said.

The Junior Science and Humanities Symposia Program is a STEM competition promoting original research and experiments in the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics at the high school level and publicly recognizing students for outstanding achievement. It is sponsored by the U.S. armed forces. Regional and national events are held annually and reach more than 8,000 high school students and teachers throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, and the Department of Defense Schools of Europe and the Pacific Rim. Students compete in a succession of regional events for selection to present at the national symposium each year.

Scarsdale's science research program is a three-year sequence of coursework and independent study. It is designed to provide students with an understanding of research methodology and is directed to students who wish to pursue original research.