Starkville High students to compete in science fair
Two Starkville High School students will travel to Los Angeles next month to compete against students from across the globe in the International Science and Engineering Fair.
Senior Angelica Sinclair and sophomore Helen Peng's projects earned them a spot in the competition after advancing beyond the state level. Both students are members of Excalibur, the SHS science honor society. This is Sinclair's first year in the international competition and Peng's second.
Peng's project is a continuation of past work in the area of providing clean water in the aftermath of disasters.
“I was actually motivated by the recent hurricane in Haiti, because I read through a lot of articles that a lot of health officials were worried about the lack of potable water, and a lot of people were actually dying from this,” Peng said.
Peng's project uses plastic water bottles coted with titanium dioxide, a substance that acts as a catalyst when exposed to light.
“Essentially, I put the dirty water in there and put it out in the sunlight, and the ultraviolet radiation from the sunlight comes in and disinfects the water,” Peng said.
Sinclair's project centers on the need to reduce the amount of plastic in the world's oceans. Her method involves the potential use of a plastic-eating bacteria, and she did the project as a hypothetical spread model.
“By 2050, there will be more weight in plastic than fish in the ocean,” Sinclair said. “I was trying to calculate originally how long it would take to degrade all toe plastic in the ocean, but then I realized a better approach with the research that I had would be to calculate how much bacteria I needed to degrade all of the plastic in the ocean with.”
Both Peng and Sinclair said they looked at science as a way to make the world a better place, and that they are considering studying science at the university level.
“We have two young women here competing at the international level in a field of study that is male-dominated,” said SHS Biology teacher and science fair mentor Michael Adam. “We're showing on a school level and a state level that we have great talent, but we have great talent from our female students. That's very important.”