By Trishala Joshi & Greg Stauffer
Members of the MHS Science Research Team did amazingly well at the 70th annual State of Florida Science and Engineering Fair in Lakeland, FL during March 25th-28th. The Bulldog state fair contingent consisted of Sofia Rodrigues, Wesley Kettering, Evan Mellor, Lucas Sarabjit, Archit Kulkarni, Dominic Tosi and Enzo Carter. Each student presented their project at the fair, which they had been focusing on for the entirety of the school year.
For instance, Kulkarni was inspired by a visit to India where he realized that it can be tedious for rural parts of the world to get pictures of their kidney, among other issues. Kulkarni said, â[My project was] to build a machine that could identify between ultrasound images with and without kidney stones, and make the resource easily accessible by putting it on a website. [I was] really happy and proud. One thing that is really good about the science fair is the feeling of accomplishment after you are done with your project, and since I won I felt even more proud.â Kulkarni said, â[I joined because] it looks very good on your resume, but also gives you a good basic understanding of the scientific method or engineering process."
Whereas it is a great honor just to earn a bid to the fair (as less than ½ of 1% of eligible students made it to the state competition), students also secured nearly $2,000 in cash prizes and $192,000 in scholarships. In particular, Rodrigues, Tosi, and Carter all placed in their categories making their projects, at a minimum, in the top 20% of state projects!
Enzo Carter stood out this year by not only winning his category (Physics and Astronomy), earning another bid to the International Science and Engineering Fair, but he also won a Best-In-Show in Physical Science award officially called a âGrand Award â Ying Scholar Awardâ. This is the highest honor possible in the state of Florida for science fairs and places his work as one of the four top Physical Science projects in the state. A traveling trophy is also awarded each year to be displayed in the front office of the recipientâs school to honor Enzo's well-earned accomplishment.
Carter said, âThe study I am presenting aimed to understand the optimal pump laser configuration to maximize the number of entangled photons produced through type-I spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC),â said Carter. âAlong with with maximizing the fidelity of those entangled photons.â It was topic similar to his project last year. âI have a hyper-fixation with light and this project allowed me to explore me to explore that interest. The higher power lasers were outperformed by the lower power lasers, and the lower power pulsed laser was the most effective pump configuration."