Regeneron finalists from Long Island in Washington, D.C., for a shot at up to $250,000 in prize money

Long Island's six Regeneron Science Talent Search finalists are not yet out of high school and already, they've worked in some of the country's leading laboratories, helped to advance scientific research and distinguished themselves among far more experienced scientists. 

And, say their advisers, this could be just the beginning.

“It’s the young minds that hopefully will be driving our science and our research in the future,” said Agnieszka B. Bialkowska, an associate professor at Stony Brook University who mentored one of the finalists, Emma Wen, of Great Neck. When Bialkowska thinks of the next generation of scientists advancing research, she said, speaking of Wen, “I see her right there."

Wen is among the 40 finalists in Washington, D.C., this weekend to present their projects to panels of experts. The winners of the student science competition, the oldest and most prestigious in the country, will be announced on Tuesday. The top award is $250,000.

Long Island has not had a first-place winner since 2000, when Viviana Risca, a teen from Port Washington who barely spoke English when she emigrated from Romania just eight years prior, took the top prize, according to Newsday archives. 

Since then, the Island’s best finishes were in 2011, when a Great Neck North High School student won second place, and in 2022, when a Ward Melville High School senior won third place. 

Alumni of the contest, run by Washington-based nonprofit Society for Science, include Nobel laureates and MacArthur Fellows. One, George D. Yancopoulos, went on to co-found Regeneron, a biopharmaceutical company in Tarrytown that became the contest’s third corporate sponsor in 2017.

The finalists typically spend months or even years working on their projects. The Island students worked in university labs from Stony Brook to Manhattan, and as far as California.

Most of their research centered on improving treatments for cancer or other serious diseases, often driven by personal experience. 

Their advisers praised their commitment to scientific exploration and expressed confidence in their potential.

Speaking of her mentee, Melody Hong, of Wantagh, biostatistician Hélène Ruffieux, from the University of Cambridge in England, said, “I have no doubt that she will make a substantial contribution to the field and more importantly, achieve remarkable things for the broader scientific community and for society."

Melody Hong, General Douglas MacArthur High School in Levittown

While most of her peers worked in university-affiliated labs, Hong did most of the work for her Regeneron project on her Apple MacBook laptop at home.

Working with Ruffieux, team leader at the University of Cambridge's MRC Biostatistics Unit, Hong created a new computer model to map parts of the human genome in a matter of months, according to the teen and a summary provided by the Society for Science.

The model is a "tool to better understand the molecular mechanisms" that can ward off some diseases, Ruffieux said in a video call. It "may yield insights about how genetics and the environment affect disease and aging," according to a project summary provided by the society.

Ruffieux said she was impressed when Hong first reached out to her last September. The teen had already read some of her research papers and came in with a clear goal. She said she saw determination and "sparks" in Hong, who had minimal guidance from her and often made a point to do things on her own first.

“Her project requires an amount of technical skills and understanding and also a scientific intuition that is rare,” Ruffieux said. “Even in experienced researchers, I don't see that very well.”

Hong, 17, said she wants to study applied mathematics and become a biostatistician. She is drawn to biology’s “never-ending complexity,” she said, and how math expresses some of that.

“It doesn't matter if you're studying whole ecosystems or the little processes that go in our cells,” she said. “No matter what scale of biology you study, it's so complex and we'll never fully understand it all, but math gives us a way to translate all the complexity into a language that we can better understand.”

Amy Xiao, Garden City High School

Xiao, 17, of Garden City, chose for her project to study the protein citrin as a therapeutic target for cancer treatment. She said she grew interested in the protein while reading scientific articles about cancer metabolism.

Last summer, Xiao worked in a lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. There, she cut the citrin gene out of colon cancer cells. Xiao said she found that this robbed them of an essential nutrient, suggesting that drugs targeting the protein could help treat cancer.

“There was really no guarantee that Amy would find that mutations in citrin increased survival rates of cancer patients,” said Steven Gordon, a science research teacher at Garden City schools. “It was just one of those things that was an original discovery.”

Besides research, Xiao said she likes to draw and is a classically trained violinist. She has played at a local hospital for Alzheimer’s disease patients. The teen said playing fulfills her but it gives her even more gratification to know her music helps others.

“The same is with research and art,” Xiao said. “I'm hoping that my research will be able to help someone who is struggling with cancer someday.”

Emma Wen, Great Neck North High School

Wen was 6 when she was diagnosed with lymphoma. Now 17, the teen doesn't fully remember her treatment but recalls the doctors and nurses who cared for her.

“I just remember all of the people who were really understanding and nice to me,” recalled Wen, whose cancer is in remission. “That made it a less traumatizing experience than it could be.”

Wen’s personal history, in part, set her on a path to study cancer for her Regeneron project. She chose to study pancreatic cancer because she knew it has a low survival rate of around 13%.

“The cancer that I had has relatively good outcomes,” Wen said. “I wasn't looking specifically for the cancer that I had because I understood that there are so many cancers out there that all need new treatments.”

Last summer, Wen worked in Bialkowska’s lab at Stony Brook University. She tested a new drug against organoids — tiny, three‐dimensional versions of tissue cultures derived from stem cells — out of pancreatic cancer cells.

Compared to two-dimensional cell lines, which are also used in cancer research, the three-dimensional organoids are "more accurate to how the drug would actually behave if people were treated by it," Wen said. “It's not completely accurate, and more research has to be conducted. But it's the next step that is very crucial to this drug’s development.”

Wen found the drug performed better than current pancreatic cancer drugs, according to a project summary.

Bialkowska said the teen followed up on a project she had planned on discontinuing until Wen’s Regeneron work changed her mind.

“She pushed this project forward,” Bialkowska said.

Sandeep Sawhney, Herricks High School in New Hyde Park

Sawhney’s project began with a problem.

The New Hyde Park resident, 18, said he decided to study gallium cancer therapy after learning that the drug eats through typical gel capsules, which "damages healthy tissues and lowers drug efficacy," according to a project summary.

Gallium, a metal ion, is used in cancer treatments. His project focused on integrating the drugs within a DNA crystal, which served as a better delivery system with fewer side effects and less damage.

Sawhney worked in a lab at New York University last summer under Clinical Professor Yoel Ohayon. Before his prototype worked, he said he had many failed tries and at one point questioned whether he would succeed.

“Throughout the month of July, I was very scared if it wasn't going to work,” Sawhney recalled.

He knew some postdocs at the lab, and they advised him that scientific experiments take time and grit. “You got to keep on going until it works,” the teen said they told him.

Ohayon, who has worked with many high schoolers, said Sawhney is driven and has an independent mind.

“The majority of high schoolers are the ones that say, ‘Tell me what to do,’ right? But Sandeep belongs to the category where he does stuff on his own,” Ohayon said. “He has this independence that's the quality that all scientists — real scientists — must have.”

Jolene Cao, Smithtown High School East

Cao, 17, spent two summers at the University of California, Riverside working in the lab of Yadong Yin, whose work in nanomaterials the teen considers to be cutting edge.

Nanomaterials are characterized by their tiny size, which are measured in nanometers. A nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter, or about “100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair,” according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

For her project, Cao made a nanomaterial that can "assemble into superstructures that emit" polarized light. It can be used in electronics, imaging for disease detection and quantum computing, according to a project summary.

During the experiment, Cao said she had many setbacks, and nothing went like she had planned. “Tiny errors in certain steps, even though they seem really small, could go off the entire experiment,” she said.

Often, she had to go back to step one and figure out what went wrong before she could continue, she said.

Yin, her mentor, said Cao's work, while still in need of further development to be published, stood out.

“I have graduate students working in my lab for five, six years, and cannot really produce the same quality of work as she did,” Yin said.

Ishana Chadha, Commack High School

Chadha, 17, had been interested in the brain since she was little.

Part of it came from watching her great-grandfather, who had Alzheimer's disease, lose his vitality and memory, and witnessing her family’s pain. As she grew older, she said she became more fascinated by its complexity.

“Everything links back to the brain,” she said. “Feelings of sadness or happiness, at the end of the day, that's what makes up our life — those emotions. … And our perception of the world just goes back to how our brain functions.”

Working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, she said she found that brain cells in developing mice did not move around correctly unless they had a specific gene. Understanding which genes affect brain cell movement may help illuminate treatment for conditions like epilepsy, according to a project summary.

“What Ishana has done is she's better defined the biochemical pathway for brain development so that potentially problems could be solved down the road,” said Daniel Kramer, one of Chadha's Commack High advisers. 

Andrea Beatty and Jeanette Collette, who also advised Chadha, praised the teen for her well-roundedness. Collette said she has seen Chadha learning to better manage her time.

“She bakes. She shares cookies with us,” Beatty said. “She's the president of the [local] National Honor Society. She’s involved in a lot of other activities on campus.”

“Ishana is just a perfectly normal, fun teenager,” Beatty said.

With Laura Mann

By Dandan Zou

dandan.zou@newsday.com@DandanZou

Dandan Zou covers education for Newsday. Previously, she worked for a community newspaper in Maryland and a personal finance magazine in Washington, D.C.