Two Herricks High School seniors were among 16 in the country to be named finalists in the 2015 Neuroscience Research Prize competition last week, according to a release from the school.
Monica Lee and Deepti Mahajan, who both conducted their own two-year research studies, will have the chance to discuss their work in telephone interviews with judges involved in the neurological field. The judges will determine the winners in January, according to the students.
Both seniors said they did not expect to be a finalist in the competition, which is sponsored by the American Academy of Neurology.
“I was actually surprised to be selected and am truly thankful for the help of my parents, science research teacher and mentor offered in the submission of my project to the AAN,” Mahajan said in an interview.
Lee said she was congratulated by her teacher before learning she had been placed as a finalist.
“She had congratulated me about the good news but I was really confused since I didn’t know what good news she was referencing,” Lee said. “She told me to check my e-mail and that’s how I found out I was a finalist.”
Lee, who wants to attend Princeton University in the fall to study biochemistry or molecular biology, submitted a project involving the use of the body’s immune system in treating Alzheimer’s disease.
“One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s is the build up of protein plaques, so we used short DNA sequences, called CpG ODN, to target a receptor that activates the innate immune system,” she said.
The project, titled “Modulating the Innate Immune System through the Stimulation of Toll-Like Receptor 9 as a Therapy for Alzheimer’s Disease in a TgSwDI Mouse Model in Both Acute and Long Term Studies,” used mice to ensure the process was non-toxic to the body, Lee said.
“I observed the short-term and long-term effects of the treatment and found that there were no harmful side effects or swelling of the brain, which were huge problems for previous Alzheimer’s therapies,” she said.
Lee said it was her mother who helped her to become interested in studying Alzheimer’s.
“She was always worrying about developing Alzheimer’s, which prompted me to do a quick Google search on Alzheimer’s to find out how scary of a disease it actually is,” Le said.
It broke my heart to see that a third of senior citizens die with some form of dementia and I knew I never wanted to see my loved ones in that position – memories are precious and to slowly forget all of them is one of the worst ways to go.”
Mahajan, who wants to study medicine after high school, said she also studied Alzheimer’s and drugs that help to treat it.
She said her project, titled “Characterization of Neuronal Nucleolar Structural Changes after Inhibition of RNA Polymerase I” studied the symptoms of “nucleolar stress,” which were shown to be similar to the symptoms of Alzheimer’s.
“Because the consequences of nucleolar stress are so similar to the pathogenesis of, for instance, Alzheimer’s, they are effective for studying neurodegenerative disease,” Mahajan said.
She said her interest in studying memory impairment began when she volunteered at a nursing home during her first year in high school.
“It was there that I met residents afflicted with neurodegenrative disorders, some with severe memory loss, my interest started there,” Mahajan said. “It was completely different than when I had indirectly learned of neurodegenerative disorders – here I was an observer.”
Students placed in the top eight of the current 16 will be rewarded with prizes and opportunities ranging from $1,000 to the chance to present their work at the AAN 67th Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. – the world’s largest gathering of neurologists, the release said.
One student will be given the opportunity to present their work at the Child Neurology Society 4th Annual Meeting in Washington D.C.
