Smithtown East Junior Earns Honorable Mention In Essay Contest

SMITHTOWN, NY — Jonathan Chung, a junior at Smithtown High School East and part of the ThINK Discovery science research program, was selected as one of 10 honorable mentions for his essay in this year’s DNA essay contest, according to the school district. The contest was sponsored by the American Society of Human Genetics.

Genome Wide Association Studies are used to associate genetic variations to certain diseases, and a lack of diverse participation can affect the pool of information available to scientists. Problems with a diverse data pool was the topic of the 2021 contest.

Students from 40 U.S. states and 30 countries submitted essays.

"It was a lot of work, but I can see that writing many drafts with lots of red marks contributes to a better quality paper," Chung said via news release.

Scientific writing requires an enormous amount of research, according to Maria
Zeitlin, ThINK research coordinator at Smithtown High School East.

"Often the topics are ones the students have never heard about and so the writing begins with hours of literature review followed by writing a minimum of four drafts," she said. "The result of all that hard work was Jonathan’s essay was very well articulated and analytical of the
problems with genomic association studies."