LBHS student named Siemens regional finalist

Senior Michelle Leonetti is the first student from Long Beach High School to be named a regional finalist in the Siemens Competition in math, science and technology.

Leonetti, along with teammates East Meadow resident Salonee Shah of W. Tresper Clarke High School and Arirudh Nandan of Los Alamitos High School in Los Alamitos, Calif., will head to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on Nov. 19 to present their project “Building of Biocompatible Scaffolds Using Hydrogels and Electrospun Fibers.” Leonetti and her team will present their paper and a 12-minute oral presentation for a chance to advance to the national finals and claim up to $100,000 in scholarship prizes.

“It’s going to be very scary, but it’s similar to other things I’ve done in the past, so I’m not really that nervous for the actual public speaking,” Leonetti said of the question and answer portion of her presentation. “But just being in the presence of people that are so intelligent makes me feel like I don’t belong there.”

Yet Leonetti is among 96 students out of 1,348 students around the country whose projects were

selected from the regional competitions. Only 16 students from New York State advanced to the regional finals, with nine calling Long Island home. While the science research program at LBHS has sent students to the semifinals, Leonetti is the first to advance to the regional finals.

Leonetti and her team worked on the project while attending the Garcia MRSEC Program at Stony Brook University this summer, where she said they encountered many lows as they did highs.

“Our cells would always die and get contaminated and we’d have to start over,” Leonetti said about the challenges of working with live skin cells. “This experience really taught me that in life some things don’t always go according to plan.” In her project Leonetti and her team “tried to optimize the regeneration of skin at the site of wounds by engineering different scaffolds upon which the cells grow,” she said. They used different hydrogels to determine which would be effective in promoting cell growth for use in tissue regeneration, organ transplantation and reduction of scar tissue after surgery.