Business
High School Scientists and Engineers Win Nearly $9 Million at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair 2023
$75,000 Top Award Goes to 17-year-old Kaitlyn Wang for breakthrough innovation to accelerate exoplanet discovery in the largest international STEM competition
About this update from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"$75,000 Top Award Goes to 17-year-old Kaitlyn Wang for breakthrough innovation to accelerate exoplanet discovery in the largest international STEM competition for teens\nTARRYTOWN, N.Y. and WASHINGTON, D.C., May 19, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: REGN) and Society for Science (the Society) announced that Kaitlyn Wang, 17, of San José, CA, won the $75,000 top award in the 2023 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (Regeneron ISEF), the world’s largest global pre-college science and engineering competition, for a project that explored planets that orbit very close around their suns. Other top prizes went to projects in the fields of computational biology, animal sciences and neurobiology. The top winners were honored during two award ceremonies, the first of which took place on the evening of May 18 and featured Special Award winners. The Grand Awards Ceremony was held on the morning of May 19 and included the announcement of the top prize of $75,000. In total, nearly U.S. $9 million was awarded to the finalists, who were evaluated based on their projects’ creativity, innovation and depth of scientific inquiry. The competition featured over 1,600 young scientists representing 49 states and 64 countries across the world. Kaitlyn Wang won first place and received the $75,000 George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award, named in honor of the pioneering drug researcher and Regeneron co-founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer, for finding an efficient way to identify certain exoplanets that orbit very closely around their stars. Previous techniques used to detect these ultra-short-period planets required enormous computational power but were not as effective at identifying these planets. Kaitlyn surmounted that problem by creating a special algorithm that runs on cheap hardware and results in much faster and higher-precision findings. Using her research, she says she found the smallest of these planets ever discovered. Saathvik Kannan, 17, of Columbia, Missouri, received one of two Regeneron Young Scientist Awards of $50,000 for using biocomputational methods to understand the causes of heightened infectivity in the disease mpox after it reemerged in 2022. Saathvik’s approach, named Bioplex, uses a combination of machine learning and three-dimensional comparative protein modeling to d...