Budget cuts and bursting class sizes haven’t stopped two Washington-area high schools from producing more elite student scientists this year than any other high schools in the nation.
At Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, 13 students became semifinalists for the Intel Science Talent Search, the nation’s most prestigious high school science and math competition. At Montgomery County’s Blair High School, 12 students earned the honor. No other school in the United States had more than nine semifinalists of the 300 chosen overall.
“I just did it because it was fun and interesting,” said Blair’s Rohan Puttagunta, 16, of his project to create a mathematical theory relating to the frequency of monochromatic rectangles in multicolored grids.
“It’s a theoretical math project, so the applications to the real world are few,” Puttagunta said. “But it made me like math even more — I did most of it over the summer, at home, for fun.”
Students often spend two years, including summers, developing and researching their projects. They submit exhaustive final papers and supporting materials to the D.C.-based Society for Science and the Public, which administers the contest.
“We tell the students that whether they win or they lose, what’s most important is the process of learning how to do science, and how to write a scholarly paper,” said Robert Latham, a lab director at Thomas Jefferson and the school coordinator for science competitions. “That stays with them for the rest of their lives — it’s important for their careers, and for just about everything they’ll do in the future.”
TJ’s Allison Koenecke might predict earthquakes. The 16-year-old analyzed the facets and ridges on crumpled-up paper as an analogy for thermodynamics. She determined the relevant mathematical formula, collected the data, and, with some amazement, said the theory and the reality measured up.
“I found the elegance of that to be sort of overwhelming,” she said.
TJ student Dennis Wang might cure Huntington’s disease, a genetic disorder that deteriorates brain functions, through his research with fruit flies.
“About 70 percent of the genes in human diseases are also present in the fly genome,” Wang said.
Those kinds of discoveries — some disconcerting, some unbelievable, and all of them complicated — won Wang and his peers $1,000 as a personal award and $1,000 eachfor their schools. Grand prizes, totaling $405,000, will be awarded in March.
