Young Kennedy epidemiologists earn scholarships

When Kennedy High School senior Emily Mauser was younger, she watched helplessly as her mother suffered migraine headaches that were so debilitating that she had to shut herself in a pitch-black room with no noise to feel any sense of relief.

That, in large part, explains why Mauser decided to study "menstrual-related migraines" as part of Kennedy's Authentic Science Research Program, which requires students to submit research papers to major science competitions such as Intel and Siemens-Westinghouse. Mauser recently learned that she was named a semifinalist in the Young Epidemiologist Scholars Competition, sponsored annually by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the College Board.

Mauser worked closely with Dr. Noah Rosen, a neuro-psychiatrist at North Shore-LIJ Medical Center, to develop a questionnaire that looked at how and when women suffer from migraines -- and at what point in the menstrual cycles they suffer from them most frequently.

Mauser, who devoted an estimated 1,200 hours to her research project, will receive a $1,000 college scholarship and read her paper at the 52nd annual meeting of the American Headache Society in Los Angeles in June.

Mauser is a co-founder and co-president of Kennedy's Hope environmental club, secretary of the Science Club and a member of the Science Olympiad team.

She plans to attend Muhlenberg College to study neuroscience.

Kennedy senior Barri Bruno, too, was named a semifinalist in the YES competition and will receive a $1,000 scholarship. Bruno studied autism, which now affects 1 in 155 children.

Specifically, Bruno looked at the Bilingual Aphasia Test, in which the researcher reads a set of sentences from cards that correspond to pictures that are shown to the study subject. Bruno wanted to see whether adding a musical beat would increase subjects' retention of words and sentences that are taught with the cards.

Bruno is secretary of the Hope club and a member of the Culture Club. She hopes to study nanotechnology and robotics at Lehigh University.

The students' mentors at Kennedy are science teachers Barbi Frank, Barbara Franklin and Helmut Schleith.

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