Thursday, October 1, 2026
Students from South Side High School took home gold and silver awards after demonstrating their creativity, imagination, critical and analytical thinking skills at Chemaginations, an annual science competition held at St. Johns University on March 9.
Projects from South Side earned one first-place and two second-place awards from the American Chemical Society. The competition is unique in that students write an article that predicts scientific advancements 25 years into the future.
Contestants must be able to discuss prior and present technology that will bring their project into the future.
Samantha Ying and Luke Botta presented their project on “Memory Loading,” which used Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, technology to maintain memory.
The duo believes this technology will help those with dementia, Alzheimer’s, and post-traumatic stress disorder in the future. Botta and Ying will compete at the Mid-Atlantic Regional meeting of the American Chemical Society’s conference at Lehigh University on June 3.
Other award-winning projects were from Victoria Lu and Cate Keenan, who developed an efficient way to obtain electricity from sludge, and Miguel Hulyalkar who developed a novel way of purifying drinking water using carbon nano paper. Each of these projects earned a second-place award.
Other participants included Jack McGowan, Megan Sullivan, and Katherine Edell, whose project was titled “Probiosis, the Key to the Fountain of Youth”; Samantha Rendino and Jack Cox, whose project was called “Synthetic Coral”; and Anna Bingham and Carley Woelfel, whose project was titled “Interfacing the Nervous System with Robotic Precision.”
“After examining the titles, I am reminded of Albert Einstein’s quote, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge,’” said Herbert Weiss, director of science research at South Side. “’For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.’”
