Proud to Honor ScienceMONTGOMERY Winners

What a treat it was to recognize four exceptionally bright students from ScienceMONTGOMERY who went on to compete at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

ScienceMONTGOMERY is a non-profit organization that uses the strength of about 200 volunteers to provide Montgomery County youth with the opportunity to compete in one of the largest science fairs in the country. The fair offers cash awards for middle and high school levels in categories including behavioral and social sciences, biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, mathematics and physics.

ScienceMONTGOMERY is associated with the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, the world’s largest pre-college science fair, and this year sponsored four grand prize winners to compete at ISEF in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The grand prize winners who competed in ISEF and who received the County Council proclamation today were:
~ Pavleen Thurkal with a project in Computer Science: Hierarchical Automatic Image Based Human Age Estimation Using Relevance Vector Machine Regression and Multi-Classifier Fusion
~ Vinay Sriram with a project in Computer Science: Quantitative Modeling of Processing Cost and Energy Consumption for Cryptographically Enhanced Secure Internet Routing Protocol
~ Nina Jessica Lu with a project in Biology: Determination of Binding Energy Hotspots on a Broadly Neutralizing Antibody Against HIV-1
~ And David Zhang with a project in Physics: Sodium Abundance of Sungrazing Comets from Multi-Spacecraft Photometric and Morphological Analysis.

The students told me that participating in ScienceMONTGOMERY, and the subsequent trip to meet and compete with over 1,500 students from 68 nations, cemented their interest in pursuing further STEM (Science, Technology, Education and Mathematics) research and studies.

ScienceMONTGOMERY president Gary Cahn and volunteers Kate Baldwin and Ellen Kominers also accepted the proclamation today.