Friday, March 28, 2025
Three students from Sacred Heart Academy were named recipients of New York Institute of Technology Mini-Research Grant Awards on Feb. 15, allowing them to pursue their civics projects with $300 stipends.
Junior Katherine Mazaroski and sophomores Isabella Cabrera and Sameera Rampertab created ambitious STEM projects as part of their AP Science seminar at Sacred Heart, an all-girls Catholic school in Hempstead.
Mazaroski and the team of Cabrera and Rampertab were each awarded grants. NYIT’s Mini-Research Grant program is in its eighth year of supporting high school students’ research with stipends that cover the costs of tools, materials and other expenses. It is open to students in the metropolitan area, and attracts about 200 applicants a year. The program awards grants for 25 projects per discipline in engineering, physical therapy, computer science and biochemistry.
Mazaroski called her project “Challenging Barriers for Diverse Clinical Participants with Traditional vs. Online Recruitment Strategies.”
“I did a lot of research over the summer this year on clinical trials and how, because of recent technology, they’ve been able to use online multi-marketplaces,” she explained. She explored the best methods for sampling participants for clinical trials to avoid skewed results, because, Mazaroski said, common strategies — such as sourcing a small number of subjects from sites like Reddit and Craigslist — will yield a group of people that may not be a good representation of the general public.
“It’s really imperative that you have diversity in clinical trials, because of the distinct biological differences between individuals of different geographical, racial or gender groups,” she said.
Mazaroski won a grant from NYIT last year for a project comparing the effectiveness of different treatments for lumbar spinal stenosis, making her one of the program’s rare consecutive winners.
Cabrera and Rampertab’s joint project is titled
“Combating Stress (The Silent Killer): Evaluating the Protective Mechanisms of Mindfulness Meditation on Explicit Memory, Blood Pressure, and Pulse Rate Through Increased Hippocampal Theta Waves and Acetylcholine Release and Cortisol Reduction.”
“We evaluated the protective mechanisms of mindfulness meditation on explicit memory,”
Rampertab said. “In this project, we use the NYIT grant to purchase a blood pressure monitor and a serene brain EEG headband to monitor the beta waves.”
The pair asked schoolmates to practice different mindfulness exercises, such as journaling and meditation, and measured their brain waves, pulse, blood pressure and memory compared with their normal state.
“This is significant for aiding Alzheimer’s patients,” Cabrera said. “Findings also suggest that decreased cortisol and anxiety levels from mindfulness meditation promote better health outcomes for hypertensive patients.”
“We’re really grateful that NYIT sponsored this, because we think that this is a very important study that needs to be done,” she added.
Stephen Sullivan, Sacred Heart’s director of research, works with students to make their projects happen.
“These grants help a lot,” he said. “It’s really a nice program to encourage work that is done in the schools, mentored by school-based faculty.”
The school has a strong track record in the mini-grant program, bringing home 13 grants in six years.
“Every year we submitted, we have won grants,” Sullivan said. “Most years we win two grants, and last year we won three.”
