Students become semifinalists in Siemens Competition

Out of the thousands of students who submitted research projects to the Siemens Science competition, seniors Alexander Li, Rishi Veerapaneni and Kristine Zhang were named semifinalists along with 463 others.

Although none of the three advanced to the regional finals, which allows only 97 of the 466 semifinalists, they each worked hard to bring their projects to fruition.

Veerapaneni’s project focused on automatically finding the boundary of cancer tumors using computer vision and machine learning.

“I was interested in learning about computer vision and the most interesting lab that offered me an internship was run by Dr. Daniel Rubin at Stanford, so I joined his lab as an intern,” Veerapaneni said.

During his internship, Veerapaneni worked with his mentor Dr. Assaf Hoogi, a postdoctoral student at Dr. Rubin’s lab. Veerapaneni described him as “a very open-minded and instructive.”

Veerapaneni plans to plan to publish a paper on their project  by December.

Zhang’s project focused on preventing the formation of neurological plaques in the brain in order to cure Alzheimer's Disease.

“I started working on research when I applied to a science internship program at the beginning of high school,” Zhang said. “It's been over a year since I started this project and [I’ve] probably [spent] several hundred hours at least.”

Zhang said she received good advice about how to approach the Siemens competition.

“First of all, start early because the lab wants to know you have experience in this, and talk to people who have have participated before so you get advice on how to write your paper,” Zhang said. 

Zhang enjoyed her experience and learned a lot through her experience in the Siemens competition.

“I’m excited about [Siemens] because there were a lot of good projects and I think research is a very valuable experience because you you learn to apply a lot of things that you learn about science,” Zhang said.