Half a million dollars in research funding changed hands at the Jack Morton Auditorium yesterday, and the oldest of the awardees were high school seniors.
“You are our future,” GW President Steven Knapp told the 20 student finalists in the 2010 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. “It is a sign of hope for all of us.”
The press conference, in which Dr. Knapp, Lisa Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and former astronaut Tom Jones addressed the media, was the culmination of a three-day program hosted at GW and announced the winners of two competitions – one for individuals and one for groups.
The students came to GW to compete for individual and team scholarships worth between $10,000 and $100,000. Project topics ranged from treating ovarian cancer to recognizing emotion in human speech, and producing hydrogen from waste to simulating human optical processing.
“I think our challenge, after seeing the quality of the work you have done, is to figure out how you got to be so good and to capture that process of education and motivation and imagination and share it across the rest of the nation through our educational system,” said Dr. Jones. “So much is riding on our ability to do that.”
“You are proving that great ideas come from every single age and every corner of our country,” said Ms. Jackson. “Some of the most innovative projects I’ve seen have actually come from high school students.”
Dr. Knapp told the students that Washington’s leading status as a center of science and technology is “one of the best kept secrets.”
He added that GW, which sponsored the 1939 conference announcing the splitting of the atom and hosted the first discussion of Big Bang theory in 1948, is currently planning for construction of a Science and Engineering Complex which will be completed in 2014.
“Doing research is a wonderful experience,” said Benjamin Clark, a senior at Penn Manor High School in Millersville, Pa., and winner of the individual $100,000 award for a project that examines how stars are born. “This is the first research project that I’ve ever done. It was such a learning experience. I found that I love it and it’s what I want to do for a career.”