Every year, seniors at Amador participate in the Regeneron Science Talent Search. The Search provides students a platform to present their original research and celebrate their hard work. It also allows the showcase of novel discoveries of young scientists who bring a fresh perspective to significant global challenges.
Scholars were chosen based on their remarkable research, leadership skills, their involvement in the community, the commitment to the academics, their creativity in asking scientific questions and exceptional promises to as STEM leaders which are shown through their original and independent research projects.
“High school seniors submit an independent research project that they’ve been working on and submit a paper to this competition. [Students are] judged based on their paper and the potential for this paper to make strides in the view of the project”, said Aditi Deshpande (‘25).
By placing in the top 300, Deshpande was given four thousand dollars overall. Half of the money was given to the school and the remainder of it was given to her. Instead of keeping the other half of the money for herself, Deshpande had an idea of what to do to help her community.
“For some of the money, it is donated to the school by the competition so the school can dedicate that money to a lot of S.T.E.M endeavors, like enhancing science labs and the department overall. For the money that I get, I’m planning on donating some of it to a pancreatic cancer research foundation, such as the pan cans, pancreatic cancer action network; dedicated to enhancing methods to detect and treat pancreatic cancer as well as focusing on his research,” said Deshpande.
Over time, a lot of research was put into this project in order to find out more about pancreatic cancer and help find a cure.
“I’ve been researching and using code in computation to research pancreatic cancer. It’s been one and a half years worth of effort where I’d search on an online data set and then I used code to find genes that are correlated with pancreatic cancer. I took some time to get help from a lot of my mentors, who were so generous about it. It’s been one and half years worth of research from the inception of my hypothesis till publishing the paper and it’s been a really interesting and fun journey from learning how to code to learning how to process the info and come up with an interpretation of how this makes sense,” said Deshpande.
Deshpande’s work provides hope for the future and further development of pancreatic cancer research.
