Eight Seneca Valley students presented their research projects at the 84th annual Pittsburgh Regional Science & Engineering Fair (PRSEF) last month at the Carnegie Science Center. They joined over 450 students from across the region to participate in this esteemed fair which serves as the qualifying event for the International Science and Engineering Fair, taking place in Dallas, Texas this May.
The PRSEF invites middle and high school students to take on the challenge of designing, implementing, and communicating an original experiment while competing for cash prizes and scholarships. On average, students spend about one year leading up to the Science Fair developing and executing their project by utilizing the scientific method.
Three students from Seneca Valley came home with awards: senior, Alexander Kim received an affiliate award from the US Navy/Marine Corp, a scholarship award from Mt. Aloysius College and a student choice award for his research on leveraging dense neural networks for improved Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling. Senior, Shivani Umesh received a sponsor award from the Spectroscopy Society and won three scholarship awards from the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, Thiel College and Washington & Jefferson College for her research on finding the limit of detection of a qPCR using eDNA. Eighth grader, Albert Pimenov won second place in Intermediate Chemistry for his research on flexible aluminum-air batteries.
Seneca Valley participants included seniors, Peter Ko, Maggie Monahan and Nancy Chen; juniors, Alexander Kim, Lihini Ranaweera, Shivani Umesh; freshman, Roshini Umesh and eighth grader, Albert Pimenov.