Six Fox Chapel Area School District students recently won awards at the 84th Annual Pittsburgh Regional Science & Engineering Fair (PRSEF), and one of those students qualified for an international competition.
Fox Chapel Area High School senior Arvind Seshan was one of six overall winners and qualified to participate in the Regeneron International Science & Engineering Fair (Regeneron ISEF) for the third consecutive year. Judging for the international competition will take place May 14-19, 2023, in Dallas, and hundreds of students in grades 9-12 from nations across the world will compete for prizes worth millions of dollars. Additionally, Arvind won first place in the senior division computer science/math category. The name of Arvind’s project is “An Iterative Neural Network Based Approach to Automated IFT-20 Sensory Neuron Identification in Caenorhabditis elegans.”
Sophomore Rohit Velankar was named the first-place winner in the senior division physics & astronomy category, and junior Adhitya Thirumala won a scholarship award from Slippery Rock University.
Additionally, three Dorseyville Middle school students were also named winners. Sixth-grader Rishabh Krishnamurthy won first place in the junior division behavioral & consumer science category and sponsor awards from Thermo Fisher Scientific, Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh & Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh, and the Naval Nuclear Laboratory. Eighth-grader Param Thawani won third place in the intermediate division engineering /robotics category and the Lemelson Early Inventor Prize affiliated sponsor award. The PRSEF also nominates all first-, second-, and third-place junior and intermediate division category winners to attend the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge (formerly called the Broadcom MASTERS competition) that is held annually in October in Washington, D.C. Seventh-grader Divya Thirumala won a Society for Women Engineers sponsor award.
The PRSEF is open to students in grades 6-12 from the 21 counties within Western Pennsylvania and Garrett County in Maryland. Each year, approximately 1,000 students from more than 100 schools compete for cash, scholarships, and trips worth thousands of dollars. All of the students who participated in the fair conducted individual science research and presented their projects to a committee of judges. The judging took place March 28 and 29 at the Carnegie Science Center. An awards ceremony was livestreamed March 31.
Arvind Seshan
