Science wizards in Five Towns

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"I was looking into the issue of why [bullying victims] didn't tell," said Shapira, who was bullied when she attended Woodmere Middle School but did not speak up. She said she was motivated to undertake the project after noticing that her younger brother had also been bullied but, unlike her, had alerted school authorities.

Shapira, who is active in Model Congress, the Hewlett High marching band and the school newspaper, has been accepted by the University of Pennsylvania, where she plans to major in engineering.

Both Shapira's and Shamir's projects were assisted by social science advisor Dr. Patricia Nardi, who said she was impressed by, among other things, the students’ time-management skills. "They were able to juggle many balls in the air at once," said Nardi. "They were quite diligent."

Studying prostate cancer

Brooks looked into how genetic factors affect prostate cancer. The Hewlett senior worked on his project, "Racial Disparity in Prostate Cancer Characterized through Evolutionary Modeling of the Genome," at New York University Medical Center and conducted research online. He studied patients with aggressive and less aggressive forms of the disease.

"My goal was to determine which genes control how serious prostate cancer is, and then from there, the next step is to actually come up with a test to determine if people have those genes," explained Brooks, a member of the high school orchestra and the Fed Challenge team. He is considering a career in the sciences at whatever college he attends next year, and in the meantime he is continuing to study prostate cancer genetics.

A silicon substitute?

Masih Das studied whether the material graphene, which has the highest electrical and thermal conductivity ever recorded, could replace silicon in transistors and computer chips. The Lawrence High School senior called his project, which he conducted at SUNY-Stony Brook's Garcia Research Center, "A Novel Chemical Synthesis for >Mums2 Graphene Sheets."

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