MINNESOTA STUDENTS COMPETE AT STATE SCIENCE FAIR

STUDENTS ACROSS MINNESOTA RECOGNIZED AT STATE SCIENCE FAIR

[ST. PAUL, MN, April 2, 2025] -- A total of 434 middle and high school students from 59 schools across Minnesota competed in the 88th annual  Minnesota State Science & Engineering Fair (SSEF) on March 28 at the Roy Wilkins Auditorium in St. Paul. SSEF is proudly organized by the Minnesota Academy of Science (MAS). Participating students advanced from regional science fairs throughout Minnesota to compete in this prestigious state event. 

"The State Science Fair highlights Minnesota students who are exploring fascinating questions and applying science and engineering practices to address challenges in their communities,” said Kristen Barry, MAS Executive Director. “I was truly impressed and inspired by their innovation and expertise—and it's clear our judges felt the same way!"

Over 40 companies and organizations gave awards valued at more than $20,000, including:

• The Regeneron International Science & Engineering Fair (ISEF) Award recognizes Minnesota’s top high school projects. ISEF is the world’s largest pre-college science competition, where thousands of students from around the world showcase their research. This year’s ISEF competition will be held in Columbus, Ohio from May 10-16. The 2025 ISEF finalists from the SSEF are:

• Simran Kaur (Mankato), New AI-based approaches to assistive technology for individuals with autism-spectrum disorder

• Juniper Setterberg (Minneapolis), Scrutinizing Sam’s Split Structure: Characterizing novel methylation and cleavage pathways in borosin natural product precursor SamA1

• Deling Chen (North Oaks), An Artificial Intelligence-Electrocardiogram Model for Prediction of Dementia—the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study

• Evan Morris (New Brighton), Shining Light on Synapses: A New Cost-Effective, Noninvasive Method to Advance Neurodegenerative Studies

• Lucas Granucci (Shorewood), Bridging Linguistic Divides: Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning and Pseudo-Labeling for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Languages

• The Medtronic Innovation Award recognizes students whose projects exemplify excellence through innovative ideas, self-motivated independent work, passion for discovery and science, and the potential to impact their category or the world. All winners receive an invitation to spend a day at Medtronic with a Technical Fellow.

• First place high school ($750): Milan Darji (Eden Prairie), Custom Enzymes to Custom Care: Ushering in the Era of Personalized Medicine Using a Novel Approach for Engineering Enzyme Specificity

• Second place high school ($500): Rathan Duggirala (Rochester), Optimizing Biological Paint Drying Time with Cellulose Nanocrystals and Chitosan Additives: A Comparative Study with Commercial Paints - Year 4

• Third place high school ($250): Vick Tan (Eden Prairie), A Reusable Teabag for Bioremediation of Arsenic from Drinking Water

• First place middle school ($750): Claire Carlson (Golden Valley), How well do different cleaning agents halt the anaerobic fermentation process of yeast and its carbon dioxide output?

• Second place middle school ($500): Lauren Chon (Rochester), Emmy Diehn (Rochester) & Hekla Thorvardardottir (Rochester), How Does Vaping Affect Tetrahymena Cells

• Third place middle school ($250): Colleen Mahr (Rochester), Helping diagnose corneal ulcers using AI machine learning

• The Medtronic Technical Achievement Award recognizes students whose projects demonstrate excellence through imagination and inventiveness, tackling a challenging technical question, rigorous scientific inquiry and execution, and the potential to solve a technical problem. 

• Biomedical Applications high school ($500): Mira Jayant (Excelsior), HOPE: A Novel Automated Device for Hemorrhage Control in Pediatric Firearm Emergencies

• Biomedical Applications middle school ($500): Grace Kaspar (Rochester), How Can a Generative AI-Powered Virtual Agent and a Mobile App Improve Better Manage Health and Lifestyle of Patients with Thyroid Diseases?

• Science & Engineering high school ($500): Riddhi Pritam Singhvi (Woodbury), Decoding Diabetes: Harnessing AI to Accurately Predict Real-Time and Future Blood Glucose Levels For Diabetes Management Using Diet, Exercise, Insulin Intake, and Heart Rate Variability

• Science & Engineering middle school ($500): Maria Kenderian (Rochester), Effect of Artificial Food Ingredients on Health: Using Daphnia Magna as a Model

• Sustainability high school ($500): John Liu (St. Paul), Solar-Enhanced Biomass-based Filtration System for Removing Microplastics and Heavy Metals

• Sustainability middle school ($500): Nora Fay (Thief River Falls), Water Tester

• Beckman Coulter’s High School Excellence in Biology Awards ($1,000) went to Evan Morris (New Brighton) for the project Shining Light on Synapses: A New Cost-Effective, Noninvasive Method to Advance Neurodegenerative Studies and Srinidhi Babu (Rochester) for the project Investigating the Role of p19Arf in Lung Cancer and Identifying Potential Gene-Targeted Therapies. Beckman Coulter’s Middle School Excellence in Biology Awards ($500) went to Grace Kaspar (Rochester) for the project How Can a Generative AI-Powered Virtual Agent and a Mobile App Improve Better Manage Health and Lifestyle of Patients with Thyroid Diseases? and Arnav Bahl (Minneapolis) for the project Antibiotic Overuse: Emergence of Resistant Bacterial Strains.

• Beckman Coulter’s High School Excellence in Engineering Awards ($1,000) went to Mira Jayant (Excelsior) for the project HOPE: A Novel Automated Device for Hemorrhage Control in Pediatric Firearm Emergencies and Huxley Westemeier (Minneapolis) for the project Integrity: Generalized Artificial Image Classification with Noise Domain Localization. Beckman Coulter’s Middle School Excellence in Engineering Awards ($500) went to Aditi Sriram (Rochester) for the project Artifix-CNN: A Novel Convolutional Neural Network to Improve Accuracy of Photoplethysmography Heart Rate and Jai Olson (Rochester), Diya Kapoor (Rochester) & Yash Parikh (Rochester) for the project Measuring and Mitigating High Ambient Noise Exposure in Rochester Public Schools.

• Ecolab’s Water Vision Awards of $700 went to high school student Isabella Wimmer (Richville) for the project Phytoremediation of Escherichia coli in Aquatic Environments Using Elodea canadensis and middle school student Freeda Ali (Rochester) for the project The Gift of Clean Water: A Solar Powered Water Purification System.

• Ecolab’s Food Safety Awards of $700 was given to high school student Alyssa Wang (Woodbury) for the project Development of edible active coating films from agro-waste for produce preservation and middle school student Derrick Leng (Rochester) for the project Observing Various Fruit Preservation Methods.

• The Broadcom Foundation’s Broadcom Coding with Commitment Award, which includes a $250 gift certificate, was awarded to Alek Kokotovich (Savage) for the project Expanding First Lego League Challenge (FLL-C) Robotics to Support Kids with Low Vision.

Please visit mnmas.org/2025-ssef-awards to see the full list of award winners. The Minnesota State Science & Engineering Fair is a program of the Minnesota Academy of Science. Medtronic is the event’s Premier Sponsor. Additional support comes from the Minnesota Alliance for Volunteer Advancement / Americorps Volunteer Generation Fund, the Broadcom Foundation, and other generous sponsors and donors.

2025 participating schools include:
A.I. Jedlicka Middle School
Armstrong High School
Avail Academy (Blaine)
Avail Academy (Edina)
Ave Maria Academy
Blaine High School – Center for Engineering, Mathematics, and Science
Blake School - Northrop Campus
Blessed Trinity Catholic School
Breck School
Burnsville High School
Centennial Middle
Century High School
Chippewa Middle School
Cloquet Middle School
Cloquet High School
Concordia Academy--Roseville
Cotter School
Dakota Meadows Middle School
Dakota Middle School
Eagle Ridge Academy
East Ridge High School
EP Academy
Franklin Middle School
Friends School Of Minnesota
Hermantown Middle School
Hidden Oaks Middle School
Hinckley-Finlayson High School
John Adams Middle School
John Marshall High School
Kellogg Middle School
Lake Crystal Wellcome Memorial Secondary
Lincoln K-8 School
Loyola Catholic School
Mahtomedi Senior High
Mankato West Senior High
Mayo High School
Minnehaha Academy North Campus
Minnetonka East Middle School
Minnetonka High School
Mounds View High School
Murray Middle School
New Life Academy
Oak Grove Middle School
Park Christian School
Parnassus Preparatory School
Perham Senior High
Robert J Elkington Middle School
Salk Middle School
Scandia Elementary IB World School
Scott Highlands Middle
St. Clair School
St. Casimir's Catholic School
St. Croix Preparatory Academy
St. Paul Academy Summit School
Stella Maris Academy
Stillwater Area High School
Twin Oaks Middle School
Wayzata High School
Willow Creek Middle School