2024 Category Awards

2024 Winners

Animal Sciences

Senior Division

• First Place: Melina Kumar | Clear Lake High School | WHY IS THE MARE ACTING LIKE A STALLION: NOVEL TESTS TO DIAGNOSE GRANULOSA CELL TUMOR (GCT)

• Second Place: Iris Chen | AST: Academy of Science and Technology | The Effects of Withanone and Gingeral on Cancer Cell Mortality in Mercenaria mercenaria: A Novel Invertebrate Model for Targeting Protein-Protein Interactions in Leukemia

• Third Place: Mallory Zumwalt | A&M Consolidated High School | Coop Culture: A Comparative Analysis of Conventional and Innovative Housing Techniques on Broiler Chicken Growth

Junior Division

• First Place: Sydney Griser | Holy Family Catholic School | Finding Planaria’s Perfect Supplement: Studying the Effects of Vitamins on Planarian Regeneration

• Second Place: Joyce Ma | McCullough Junior High School | Palaemon Paludosus as Bioindicators

• Third Place: Caden Pohlkamp | Brookside Intermediate | Tiny Bacteria, Big Sand Shrimp Problem?

Behavioral and Social Sciences

Senior Division

• First Place: Maya Shah | Martin STEM School | Prevention of Gun Violence through the buffering effects of Intellectual Humility in Traumatized Psychopaths

• Second Place: Santosh Patapati | Panther Creek High School | The Future of DSM: A State of the Art, Machine Learning Approach to Depression Diagnosis From Remote Clinical Interviews via Multimodal Neural Networks and Large Language Models

• Third Place: Evelyn Ding | Plano West Senior High School | An Artificially Intelligent System for Early Detection of Developmental Speech and Language Disorders in Children

Junior Division

• First Place: Sophia Rice | McCullough Junior High School | Can Positive Peer Mentorship Improve Anxiety?

• Second Place: Allison Evans | Young Women’s Leadership Academy | Understanding Domestic Adoption of Superworms for Polystyrene Recycling

• Third Place: Rishaan Raghavnath | Lawler Middle School | Spark – A Novel Application Designed for the Aid of Alzheimer’s Patients Through the Use of Facial Recognition, Slowing Cognitive Deficits and Efficiently Prompting Memory

Biochemistry

Senior Division

• First Place: Aarush Kudariya | Seven Lakes High School | Targeting Amyloid-β Plaques: In Silicon Protein Modeling of Novel Antibody for Halting Alzheimer’s Disease Progression

• Second Place: Manyaa Bhatia | Reedy High School | Development of Novel Early-Diagnostic Methodology for Glioblastoma and Alzheimer’s Disease

• Third Place: Media Pulluru | Vista Ridge High School | Understanding the Effects of Methamphetamine and Similar Stimulants on Contracting Cerebral Cavernous Malformation Symptoms

Junior Division

• First Place: Karishma Parghi | Knox Junior High School | Silvered Nano-Trash: Novel Applications of Silver Nanoparticles Derived from Spent Coffee Grounds Utilizing Green Synthesis Technology

• Second Place: Eva Wimberly | Young Women’s Leadership Academy | Enzymes Solve Plastic Problems

• Third Place: Max Lim | Challenger School | Solution to Lactose Intolerance

Biomedical and Health Sciences

Senior Division

• First Place: Ellie Chong | Highland Park High School | Development of a Accessible pH-Monitoring Wound Dressing for Early Detection of Surgical Site Infections

• Second Place: Neha Anurag | Ridge Point High School | A Novel Gene Signature for Advancing Breast Cancer Detection Using Liquid Biopsy

• Third Place: Sharmada Palakurthi| W.B.Ray High School | Preclinical Investigation to Develop Anti-platelet and Cholesterol lowering agent for Prevention and Treatment of Stroke

Junior Division

• First Place: Aryan Ganglani, Aaron Mehta and Ahaan Thota | Sartartia Middle School | Automatic Diabetic Retinopathy Screening

• Second Place: Hamsika Kolluru | Canyon Vista Middle School | Detecting Early Signs of Alzheimer’s Using Deep Learning Models

• Third Place: Isa Montemayor and Pia Nathani | Keystone School | Chlorine Levels in Different Types of Eggs and its Importance in Cognitive Function

Biomedical Engineering

Senior Division

• First Place: Shreyas Vatts | The Woodlands College Park High School | NitinArm: Engineering a Lighter and Cheaper Trans-Radial Prosthetic with Nitinol to Increase Dexterity

• Second Place: Bonnie Chan, Xinyu He and Aditya Jain | School | Using Thermoactive Soft Actuators to Replicate Muscular Movement for the Application of Human Prosthetics

• Third Place: Anushka Aggarwal and Madison Burke | Dulles High School | Using Machine Learning to Diagnose Morphological Abnormalities of Blood Samples to Diagnose Leukemia and Malaria

Junior Division

• First Place: Samvith Mahadevan | Canyon Vista Middle School | Novel Application of Olfactory Sensor Arrays in the Detection of Food and Environmental Allergens, Using Artificial Intelligence

• Second Place: Maan Patel | McCullough Junior High School | Myopia: The Ciliary Muscle Training App

• Third Place: Vihaan Shah | Creekside Park Junior High School | BAND AI-ID

Cellular and Molecular Biology

Senior Division

• First Place: Manya Gummaraju | Plano East Senior High School | Tartrazine Dysregulates Retrotransposons and p53 Expression in Drosophila melanogaster

• Second Place: Zehra Jaffery | Plano West Senior High School | Selenoprotein O Protects Against Oxidative Stress and Incorporates Various Nucleotides in AMPylation

• Third Place: Aarav Gedala | Keystone School | Identifying the Molecular Link Between Endoplasmic Reticulum Morphology and Divalent Magnesium Cation Signaling Through Protein Sequence Similarity Search Tools and Phylogenetic Analysis

Junior Division

• First Place: Jaxson Lozano-Lomeli | Marzano Middle School | Dirty Daphina: Investing the effects of water pollution on Daphnia Magna

• Second Place: Alexa Perez Rosales | Harmony Science Academy – Carrollton | The changes in Strawberry DNA Throughout Different Growth Phases

• Third Place: Amna Beg | Austin Peace Academy | Creating Artificial Trees to Combat Climate Change

Chemistry

Senior Division

• First Place: Shivani Mundra and Madelyn Puza | The Academy of Science and Technology | From Crown to Current: Engineering Cellulosic Fiber-Based Battery Cells – A Safe and Scalable Alternative to Lithium Technology

• Second Place: Oliver Morabbi | Lake Travis High School | Shocking Chemistry: Nitrogen Fixation Via a Plasma Reactor

• Third Place: Crystal Liu | West Brook High School | Unveiling the Beauty of a Cleft-Shaped Pyridyl Amidothiourea Ligand: A Highly Selective and Sensitive Fluorescent Chemosensor for Zinc(II) Ion Detection

Junior Division

• First Place: Mia Bustamante, Cohen Rumsey and Abigail Terry | Spring Hill Junior High | Radioactivity with a Cloud Chamber

• Second Place: Ankita Javvaji | Challenger School AVR | Crime Scene Chemistry:Chemiluminescence of Luminol

• Third Place: Clare McKenna | McCullough Junior High School | Factors Affecting Enzyme Catalysis in the Catalase Enzyme via Yeast

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Senior Division

• First Place: Patrick McKenna | Academy of Science and Technology at College Park High School | BioVision: A Novel In-Silico Drug Discovery Pipeline to Predict Drug Candidates for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

• Second Place: Shaumprovo Debnath | Keystone School | Decoding Imagined Speech: Using a Convolutional Neural Network to Classify Subvocalized Letters Collected Non-invasively by an Electroencephalogram

• Third Place: Vaani Chellamuthu | Plano East Senior Highschool | Diagnosing Neurodegenerative Pathologies using Image-Recognition in CNN

Junior Division

• First Place: Akansh Karthik | Rice Middle School | Detecting Stripe Rust in Wheat Plants using Machine Learning

• Second Place: Shruti Paul | Schimelpfenig Middle School | Gait Guardian: An IMU-Based Approach to Aid in Early Detection of Parkinson’s Disease

• Third Place: Aidan Ibarra | John Drugan School | The correlation of brain cancer rates and the use of bluetooth headphones

Earth and Environmental Sciences

Senior Division

• First Place: Justin Huang and Victoria Ou | The Academy of Science and Technology | Acoustic Filtration: Harnessing Ultrasonic Technology for the Streamlined Removal of Microplastic Particles from Water Flow

• Second Place: Gwen Rodriguez | Harmony Science Academy | Effects of Climate Change on the Upper Rio Grande Basin

• Third Place: Samuel Li | Vandegrift High School | Predicting Seasonal Atlantic Hurricane Activity Utilizing Climatic Patterns and a Machine-Learning Approach

Junior Division

• First Place: Rhea Chidambaram | The Village School | From Landfill to Lab – Unveiling the Biodegradable Potential of Everyday Materials for Packaging

• Second Place: Luke Porterfield | Westbrook Intermediate | The Effects of Substrates on Zophobas Morio Biodegradation of Polystyrene

• Third Place: Nidhi Ajmera | Otto Middle School | Iron Laden: The Effect of Ferrofluidic Blankets on Subsurface Water Temperature

Embedded Systems

Senior Division

• First Place: Ethan Moloney, Alexander Park and Aditya Penematsa | Cinco Ranch High School | CapLink: A Novel LoRa based Water Leak Detection System Utilizing Paintable Sensors

• Third Place: Edward Bao | BASIS San Antonio Shavano | Giving Robot Hands a Feeling

Junior Division

• First Place: Advika Gunturu | West Ridge Middle School | Electrifying Footsteps

• Second Place: Lucy Do | St. Helen Catholic School | Data at the Speed of Light

• Third Place: Levi Leibman and Max Madof | The Emery Weiner School | A temporally calibrated infrared thermometric method for detecting ocean-surface microplastics

Energy: Sustainable Materials & Design

Senior Division

• First Place: Inu Baek | The Academy of Science and Technology | DynaCap: A Dynamic Wheel Cover System for Improving the Range and Performance While Reducing CO2 Emissions from Automobiles

• Second Place: Arya Gurumukhi | Plano East Senior High School | “The Bionic Leaf”: Developing a Novel Bi-Functional Nickel Oxide Catalyst to Use With the Bacterium Ralstonia eutropha for Artificial Photosynthetic Systems

• Third Place: Krishn Virani | Plano East Senior High School | Using Shewanella oneidensis with Activated Carbon and Graphite Electrodes to Optimize Energy Capture Efficiency from Microbial Fuel Cell Processes

Junior Division

• First Place: Joshua Wallace | Peet Junior High School | Bio-Power 2: How Soil Additives Affect Microbial Power Generation

• Second Place: Sarah Edwards and Shantenu Sellappan | Friendswood Junior High | The Better Wind Turbine

• Third Place: Avi Arun, Ayaan Khan and Gautam Thimmapuram | Noel Grisham Middle School | Flowing Towards Efficiency: Investigating the Impact of Fluid Flow Rate on Geothermal Heat Transfer

Engineering Technology: Statics and Dynamics

Senior Division

• First Place: Victoria Mascorro | Valle Verde Early College High School | Exploring Eutectic Alloys in Microgravity: Advancing Space-Based Manufacturing through Controlled Freezing

• Second Place: Kaitlyn Bird | Academy of Science and Technology | BLA Wing: Boundary Layer Adhesion Prototype to Minimize Aircraft Stalling via Wind Tunnel Testing Apparatus

• Third Place: Henry Aceves and Donovan Burke | The Academy of Science and Technology | ArmAssist: A Lightweight, Concealable Active Arm Support that Empowers Individuals Suffering From Muscle Atrophy

Junior Division

• First Place: Alexa Lopez | Brookside Intermediate School | Modifying the Bass Drum Pedal for the Disabled

• Second Place: Pranavi Chatrathi | Pioneer Heritage Middle School | Year 2: Side Impact Car Crash – Designing the various systems involved in External Airbag, eSRS (external Supplementary Restrain System), for collision energy dissipation

• Third Place: Katia Ramirez | Vela Middle School | Turbine Innovation

Environmental Engineering

Senior Division

• First Place: Naithruv Kashyap and Suchir Kumar | Westwood High School | Sustainable Bee Keeping Project – Sensor-assisted monitoring for operational, investigative, and predictive hive health management for honeybee colonies

• Second Place: Aneesh Mootha and Anika Mootha | Greenhill School | Use of Chlorite Dismutase Enzymes to Reduce Methane Emissions from Landfills

• Third Place: Henry Denham, Brock Kelly and Max Martin | St. Johns School | Autonomous Precision Agricultural System

Junior Division

• First Place: Adya Tripathi | Jose M. Lopez Middle School | Stabilizing Soil to Reduce Potential Building Foundation Movement by Using Sustainable Additives

• Second Place: Hiruni Wansapura | Robinson Middle School | Sycamore Seed Inspired Fan Blade Design for a Portable Air Purifier

• Third Place: Soaham Kumar | Santa Gertrudis | Development of a Viable,Cost-effective,Sustainable,and pontential solution to Heavy Metal Pollution in water

Materials Science

Senior Division

• First Place: Nikita D’Souza and Grace Yuan | AST: Academy of Science and Technology | Engineering a Greener Future: A Novel, Biodegradable, Self-Powered, Chitosan-Based Food Packaging Material

• Second Place: Sophia Melancon | Kinder High School for Performing and Visual Arts | Fabrication of a radiopaque resorbably polymer for medical device development

• Third Place: Vasundhra Arulazi | Lawrence E. Elkins High School | Molybdenum Doped BiVO4 Thin Films in Gas Sensing application

Junior Division

• First Place: Elisa Shaw and Erica Shaw | Gilmer Intermediate School | Define the Damage

• Second Place: Chloe Fierro | Homeschool | agri-Q: A study of the efficacy of novel, biopolymer-based hydrogels for agricultural use

• Third Place: Avelar Jezenya and Sophia Moreno | Santa Gertrudis School | GO WITH THE FLOW

Mathematics

Senior Division

• First Place: Anna Oliva | Carnegie Vanguard High School | Symmetry, fixed points and quantum billiards: A confluence of ideas

• Second Place: Samita Shankar | A&M Consolidated High School | Computing the Fourth Moment of Generalized Kloosterman Sums

• Third Place: Meryl Zhang | Plano Senior High School | A Race Against Time: A Hybrid, Efficient Multiplication Algorithm Utilizing Crossover Points

Junior Division

• First Place: Melek Ozturk | Harmony School of Innovation | Find the total number of different ways from A to B

• Second Place: Anumita Pandit | Pioneer Heritage Middle School | Using Machine Learning To Test The Effects Of Changing Fire Conditions On Wildfire Behavior

• Third Place: Zoe Alcantar | Seabrook Intermediate | Get More Goals: Data’s Secrets

Microbiology

Senior Division

• First Place: Calvin Carpenter | All Saints High School | Ketones produced by Bacillus subtitles Bacteria: Assessing Inhibition and Morphological Changes on Deadly Bat Fungus, Psuedogymnoascus destructans

• Second Place: Kendall Wu | Dulles High School | p14 Viral Fusogen-Aided CAR T Immunotherapy: A Novel Approach to Solid Tumor Heterogeneity and Antigen Escape

• Third Place: Elgin Tawiah | Plano East Senior High | Phage-Mediated Inhibition of Type IV Pili: Disrupting the Competence System and Mitigating Antibiotic Resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae

Junior Division

• First Place: James Richter | STEM Academy/Nimitz MS | Patching Ozone Holes With Bacteria

• Second Place: Avery Jackson-McNamara and Ames Ket | Saint Paul’s Episcopal Day School | Project

• Third Place: Elina Sarkar | Long-View Micro School | The Rise of Thermotolerant Pathogenic Fungi

Physics and Astronomy

Senior Division

• First Place: Shuhei Ogasawara | John Jay Science and Engineering Academy | Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability: Studying the Effects of Density and Velocity on Vortex Formations

• Second Place: Yash Semlani and Mihir Relan| Michael E. Debakey High School for Health Professions | PCN: A Deep Learning Approach to Jet Tagging Utilizing Novel Graph Construction Methods and Chebyshev Graph Convolutions

• Third Place: Suhaan Khan | McNeil High School | AI Detection Use in Gravitational Microlensing Techniques: A Novel Utilization of Artificial Intelligence for Gravitational Microlensing Detection and Dark Matter Discoveries

Junior Division

• First Place: Iliana Lega | Homeschool (Travis Vanguard) | Spectral properties of smart phone facial recognition

• Second Place: Jairam Susarla | The Honor Roll School | Evaluating Various ML Models to Efficiently Uncover Exoplanets

• Third Place: Arnav Saraf | Canyon Vista Middle School | Unveiling Harmonics: An Exploration of Hidden Notes in Tanpura

Plant Sciences

Senior Division

• First Place: Trisha Bhat | Plano East Senior High School | Aqua-Arsenic Remediation: Analysis of the Oryza sativa meta genome and Wet-Lab Approach to Increase O. sativa Tolerance to Drought and Arsenic through Hyperexpression of Aquaporin genes OsNIP2;1, OsNIP3;2 and OsPIP2;2

• Second Place: Julia Zupancic | Christ the King Diocesan High School | Urban Air Pollution Mitigation: Dust-Phytoremediation and Impact on Plant Physiology, Anatomy, and Biochemistry

• Third Place: Vibhan Emmi | The Academy of Science and Technology | Investigating the Potential of Surplus Abscistic Acid (ABA) to Mitigate the Effects of the Bacterial Pathogen, Agrobacterium tumafaciens, in in-vitro fertilization of Rosa hybrids L

Junior Division

• First Place: Elizabeth Cruce-Roberts | Christ the King Diocesan School | Wild Wildflowers Year 4: The Effects of Natural Fertilizers on the Germination of Wild Flowers

• Second Place: Live Wang | Kealing Middle School | Electroculture

• Third Place: Varun Iyer | McCullough Jr High School | Analyzing the Morphological and Growth Responses of Brassica Juncea During Lead Compound Salt Phytoextraction

Robotics and Intelligent Machines

Senior Division

• First Place: Ayaan Dhuka, Landon Doughty and Caiman Moreno-Earle | St. John’s School | Easy AED: An Autonomous VTOL Emergency Equipment Delivery Drone System

• Second Place: Arav Mehta and Aayan Pattanayak | Tomball High School | An Eye-Controlled Wheelchair(ECW): Design and Development of a Novel, Non-Invasive and Cost-Effective Human-Computer Interface(HCI) for Patients with Motor Neuron Disease

• Third Place: Anirudh Narayanan | Plano East Senior High | Swimguard: An Intelligent Drone with Deep Learning Capabilities for Lifeguard and Coach Assistance through Swimmer Pose Recognition

Junior Division

• First Place: Hiba Taimoor | Islamic School of Irving | AssistBot: Service and Companion Robot for the Elderly, Lonely, and Impaired

• Second Place: Siya Adur | McCullough Junior High School | Using Convolutional Neural Networks to Classify Alzheimer’s Stages

• Third Place: Taylor Anthony, Lekang Ji and Ryan Zhang | T.H. Rogers Middle School | Vibration Fire Alarm for the Audio Impaired

Systems Software

Senior Division

• First Place: Ishan Pendyala | Friendswood High School | Developing Epileptic Activity and Trigger Content Detection Software using a Computer-Based Application for Real Time Monitoring and Seizure Reporting

• Second Place: Ram Sivaraman | Liberal Arts and Science Academy | HM-Detect: A New Method for Murmur Detection and Classification Using Signal Processing and Sound Feature Analysis

• Third Place: Cody Zhu | Keystone School | Using AI and Deep Learning for Early and Accurate Detection of Agricultural Disease

Junior Division

• First Place: Krishiv Lamba | Uplift North Hills Preparatory | Quantum Safeguard: Transforming Digital Security with Cutting-Edge Lattice-Based Encryption Strategies

• Second Place: Srikar Karri | Karri Home School | Lives Saved, Minutes Matter: An AI App for Faster Pneumonia Diagnosis

• Third Place: Shaan Patel | McCullough Junior High | STEMI-Stat: Reducing treatment delay in critical heart attack patients via an ML and location service integrated app

Translational Medical Sciences

Senior Division

• First Place: Rashmi Basu | Keystone School | Utilizing Indoyanine Green and Sodium Alginate with Microsphere Drug Delivery and Infrared Imaging: A Model to Create More Accessible Therapeutic Diagnostic Tools for Cardiovascular Disease and Cancer

• Second Place: Alanna Polyak | Plano West Senior High School | Utilizing Planarian Neoblast Stem Cells and Starfish Neural Networks on Lumbricus Terrestrial as a Model Organism to Investigate Possible Cures and Preventative Measures for Central Nervous System (CNS) Disorders

• Third Place: Nishi Soni | Centennial High School | The Therapeutic Potential of Suppressing Chemokine Receptor CXCR4 Pathway Components in Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC) Through First-Generation Potent Inhibitors

Junior Division

• First Place: Apoorva Gautham | Uplift North Hills Preparatory Middle School | Boosted Biotics with Microbial Alchemy: A Low Cost, Scalable, Translational Approach to Propagate Probiotic Supplements in Fermented Food Matrices to Mitigate Malabsorption in Developing Countries

• Second Place: Jonathan Shen | Charles B. Pearson | Validation of a Self-Monitoring Tool for Early Glaucoma Detection

• Third Place: Taneem Ahmed | Renaissance Academy | Can Black Seed Oil Work as Efficiently as Common Antacids?