By Tanushri Shah
(Toms River, NJ—March 30, 2017) On Thursday, March 30th, and Friday, March 31st, High Tech Students visited Ocean County College for the First Annual South Jersey Junior Science Symposium, announced Dr. Joseph Giammarella, Principal of High Tech High School.
Students presented more than sixty research projects from STEM fields at the Junior Science Symposium. On the morning of Thursday, March 30, 2017, Shelina Chotrani of Secaucus, North Bergen resident Jeel Shah, and Muhammad Umar of Bayonne, all presenters at the general poster session, and North Bergen resident Tanushri Shah, an observer, attended several interesting, intellectual oral presentations. Afterward, the general poster presentations took place.
Umar won second place and Shah won third place in the “Life Sciences & Biology” category. Other activities included “Electrostatic Sword Tournaments,” trivia, and puzzles.
Some attendees accepted invitations to an evening banquet at the Clarion Hotel, where many students, like Maya Ravichandran, won $150 for winning the Student Choice Awards and a $200 environmental scholarship. Ravichandran collaborated with Princeton University to research environmentally-sustainable concrete.
On the last day, final oral presenters wrapped up their presentations. For example, seventeen year-old Indrani Das worked on “Exosomal microRNA-14a: Mechanistic Reactive Astrocyte Repair in Brain Injury In vitro.” Das won the Junior Nobel Prize for her pioneering research in brain injury and disease, and earned a well-deserved $250,000. Das discovered a method of increasing the survival rate of neurons after brain injuries.
