Lincoln Park High School seniors Shamita Chaudhuri and Sehar Gafoor are among the four students selected at the recent Chicago Student Science Fair to compete in the International Science and Engineering Fair to be held in Portland, OR, the first week of May. They will compete with over 1,200 other talented science students from all over the United States and 40 foreign countries.
In addition, two alternates were chosen to compete if any of the four winners are unable to do so. This year, those alternates are also LPHS students; they are freshman Marguerite Korenblit and sophomore Daniel Blumenthal.
Further, 11 Lincoln Park High School students were chosen to advance with their projects to state competition at the Illinois Junior Academy of Science State Fair/ Symposium to be held in May on the campus of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. In the Research Paper Symposium 10 LPHS students were chosen to advance.
Both Chaudhuri and Gafoor were chosen last fall as semifinalists in the prestigious Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology for 2003-2004. Of the 10 semifinalists chosen in Illinois, Chaudhuri and Gafoor were the only ones from Chicago. Both young women have received numerous other awards for their projects.
Chaudhuri's biochemistry project is entitled "Microarray Analysis Reveals Glucocorticoid Induced Apoptosis in Epithelial Breast Cancer Cells." She became interested in oncology and hematology research because several family members have breast and other types of cancer.
When a friend's grandmother was diagnosed with the Alzheimer's disease, Gafoor's interest was piqued and she began reading about it, eventually leading to a health science research project called "S100B and Glia with Relevance to Alzheimer's Disease." |
