The 7th annual Glastonbury High School STEMposium took place online on May 27, via the Zoom platform.
Normally, the event would include a presentation in the school’s auditorium, and then a science fair style exhibition of the Advanced Research Mentorship students’ work over the past school year.
Instead, students attended a virtual meeting, and four presented their projects during the meeting, while all who took part got to give a brief description of their projects, and have their findings and reflections posted on a STEMposium website, https://sites.google.com/a/glastonburyus.org/science/high-school-curriculum/stemposium-exhibition.
GHS senior Ricky Dube emceed the live event.
“This afternoon is dedicated to celebrating science and encouraging exploration through research,” Dube said, explaining that the ARM class asks students to find a mentor – a doctor, professor, or professional, usually at a major university – to guide you in a research project.
Senior Jacob Krucinski presented his research about Neural Networks 101, in which he explained that machine learning has grown popular, but many people don’t understand how they work. He showed the different kinds of networks and how they function, and some of the many examples of machine learning. One that interested him enables a machine to look at an image, and then a second image, such as a painting, and apply the style of the painting to the first image.
“It’s as if the artist had painted that [first] image,” Krucinski said, explaining that a similar type of machine learning, called object detection and image-capturing is used in self-driving vehicles, as well as medical applications, such as tumor detection.
“It’s also used in data regression and clustering, to see if there is any date correlation in variables,” he said.
Trisha Musall, also from the Class of 2020, presented her research project, “The Estrous Cycle and Behavior,” which studied how hormones affect behavior in female rats. In part of her research, she placed a rat on a raised platform with and enclosed area, and three open-sided, plank-like walkways, to see if the rat would spend more time in the safer area, or take more risk on the open walkways.
“My research can help women suffering from mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, which entails risky behaviors, as well as women struggling with drug or alcohol addiction,” she said.
The rats were tested to see where in the estrous cycle (similar to the human menstrual cycle) they were, then placed in the elevated maze and observed.
The experiments showed that the rats in the proestrous phase of the cycle were less willing to venture into the unprotected part of the maze.
“Decreased percent of open-arm time in proestrous means increased anxiety,” she said. “This could possibly be explained by the increased hormone levels during proestrous, as well as the fact that any animal’s goal is to pass on its genetic code, which is done in the following stage of estrous.”
Senior Ananya Aggarwal’s presentation was “Enzyme Triggered Degradation Studies of a Nucleus Targeting Nucleic Acid Nanocapsule.” Senior Julia Hoffman’s presentation was “The Molecular Basis for Catastrophic Spore Inviability When a Prolyl Isomerase and an E3 SUMO Ligase are Simultaneously Absent in Saccharomyces Cerevisiae.”
ARM instructor Diane Pintavalle said the first broadcast STEMposium was a huge success.
“With a strong foundation of public speaking skills, the students were highly capable of making the transition to the virtual format,” Pintavalle said. “The students decided that the ‘STEMposium must go on.’ In less than three weeks and only one scheduled rehearsal, they planned and delivered a celebration and showcase of their work to a live audience.”
Pintavalle added that the students were able to make the transition to the virtual format fairly easily, because of the timing of when the school switched to distance learning.
“The students in ARM were well prepared for remote learning. In mid-March, the students were nearing the end of their on-site research experiences and were shifting towards communicating their work in their research articles and scientific posters,” she said. “The transition to e-learning was relatively easy for them and they were able to meet virtually, as needed, with their mentors.”
