State Sen. Elaine Phillips (R-Flower Hill) stopped by Hillside Public Library on Thursday to personally congratulate six students for being named Siemens semifinalists.
“It is so easy for adults to say, ‘this generation,'” Phillips said, referring to the contempt some hold for the millennial generation. “But the nice thing about this job is that I get to meet young people like you and it really makes me confident that the world will be a better place for my grandchildren.”
The Siemens Competition has students from across the country submit science research projects to compete for scholarships. Scholarships for winning projects range from $1,000 to $100,000 for first place.
Twenty-three North Hempstead students were named either finalists or semifinalists. Finalists include Austin Lee of Roslyn High School, Sahith Vadada of Herricks High School, Rushikesh Patel, also of Herricks, Vedant Singh of the Wheatley School and Baokun Gu of Manhasset High School.
Nassau County Legislature Presiding Officer Rich Nicolello (R-New Hyde Park) stopped by briefly to congratulate the students.
“Congrats to everyone, and a big thanks to your parents for all that they did,” he said.
The projects chosen ranged from the study of cancer cells to the “Observation of the chiral magnetic effect in the Quark-Gluon plasma produced in Au+Au collisions at the relativistic heavy ion collider.”
“Some of the projects you did, I could barely even say them,” Phillips joked.
Six different North Shore schools had Siemens semifinalists, but only students from Herricks and Great Neck South were in attendance. Phillips said scheduling conflicts with other schools were the reason some students could not attend.
Four of the women were from Great Neck South.
Kimberly Lu studied how a cancer cell was resistant to a chemotherapy drug topotecan. Cindy Wang studied the matter that was generated during collisions of heavy iron, which would help to better understand the particles that make up all matter.
Michelle Xing carried out chemical treatments of algae to create nanocellulose, which was shown to absorb lead from the water. And Ann Zhang worked on a team project to refine the data collection process to create better climate models.
Herricks was represented by Joanna Lau and Christina Kim, who worked together on “The Effect of Bisphosphonates on Cell Viability of EGFR Driven Liver Cancer”
Lau explained why she wanted to work specifically on liver cancer.
“The current treatment wasn’t working in the longterm, and it was one of the largest mortality causing cancers,” she said.
Kim said she was shocked when a friend informed her she was a semifinalist during orchestra class.
“I didn’t believe it at first, I thought no way because we felt our project wasn’t good enough,” she said. “It was surprising and I was so happy.”
