Congratulations to the Walt Whitman winners of this year’s Long Island Science Congress Awards! Long Island Science Congress is an annual exhibit of science projects from students in middle schools, junior high schools and senior high schools all across Nassau and Suffolk judged by science educators and professionals. Awards are given out in various categories, including monetary awards. Projects encompass all categories of science research and study including behavioral science, biology, chemistry, earth science, ecology and physics.
Students select a topic for experimentation, document their research, prepare an abstract, and then present their findings to the judges on the day of the Congress. This year’s Congress was held at Walt Whitman High School on April 18th and 19th. The winners were announced at an awards ceremony on Friday, June 2nd.
In the Junior Division, Sanobar Mohammed won the Lloyd K. Chanin Memorial Award and $50 for her research on head and neck cancer, focusing on various factors that may or may not have a significance on survival months. She also received a High Honors award.
A High Honors award went to the team of Liana Chetty and Marin McDonnell who experimented using a fungi found in the Amazonian rainforests of Ecuador that has plastic degrading abilities (mycoremediation). They wanted to contribute to research showing that mycoremediation could clear up plastic in landfills.
Alex Gillet took High Honors for researching a theory on using robotic umpires in baseball, and whether they would be more accurate than human umpires and not alter the game unfairly.
An Honors award went to Kritz Taku who experimented on white button mushrooms, a staple of many nations’ agricultural economies. This project looked at how air pressure affects the development of button mushrooms in order to better understand how they could be grown in new environments.
Honors were also received by Jake Williams who looked at how light pollution affects coral.
In the Senior division, Christopher Martinez and Bronsyn Chiechi won an Honors award for their project on the development of a carbon sink using a macro-algae bioreactor. A carbon sink is anything that absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases such as plants, the ocean and soil.
The first Long Island Science Congress was held on May 20th and 21st, 1950 at what was then known as Adelphi College in Garden City.