Hopkinton High School students Shrija Kumar (left) and Garima Chauhan stand in front of their project at the annual HHS Science Fair on Wednesday. PHOTO/JOHN CARDILLO

The team of Dylan Striek, Rylee Blair and Disha Mudenur captured first place at the Hopkinton High School Science Fair on Wednesday with their project titled “Electrolytic Extraction of Dawsonite from Ocean Water: Efficient Saltwater Mineral Recovery through Electrolysis.”

Second place went to Briana Mallouh, Tomo Oga and Avani Daga for “Next Time-Step Pollution Level Prediction Using Custom Recurrent Neural Networks.”

Third place was awarded to Srilakshmi Venkatesan for “Utilizing Hypermagnesemia to Understand the Impact of Neuromuscular Blocking Agents on Caenorhabditis Elegans: A Safe Novel Automated Model for Paralytic Drug Testing.”

The Valerie Lechtanski Prize for Perseverance was presented to Syesha Sen, Haasini Yarram and Snigdha Marapally, whose project was titled “Nailed it: Effects of Chemicals on Air Quality in Nail Salons.”

In addition to the top three finishers, nine other individuals or teams qualified for this Friday’s regional qualifier at WPI:

Juliet Findlen for “Chlorella vulgaris as a model for photobioreactor use in industrial carbon removal”;

Arin Upalekar, Alexander Stephan and Nathan Hung for “Utilization of Coagulant Chemicals to remove Microplastics from Laundry Water”;

Necalli Vela-Garcia, Surya Raja-Amudhan and Nithu Sridharan for “PFAS Pollution and Its Effects on Daphnia Pulex: Implications for the Environment and Human Health”;

Akshay Jana and Shaurya Patni for “Treating Transgenic C.Elegans with antioxidant supplements to alleviate symptoms of ALS”;

Sahithi Pogula for “In Silico SALL4 Oncogene Overexpression Correlation to Non-Coding RNA Post-Transcriptional Regulation and Epigenetic Control”;

Jacob Dold and Kaizar Rangwala for “Artificially Intelligent Diagnosis and Databasing of CNS & Brain Tumors Using Multilayer Perceptron Neural Networks”;

Shrija Kumar and Garima Chauhan for “Utilizing Lactate, a Cell Waste Product To Increase Immunity in Pink Shrimp: a Model for Immune Response”;

Piyusha Majgaonkar and Miyu Hasegawa for “Natural Water Filter? The Phytoremediation of Lead and Fluoride using Water Hyacinths”;

and Izael Thomas, Raquel Abraham and Isaiah Kuruvilla for “The Effect of Berberine on Planarian Eye Regeneration.”

“Our new format worked out well and I am so grateful to the many community members who stepped up to help us out at the last minute with the snow day scramble,” Science Fair coordinator Kristen Murphy shared. “I feel fortunate to teach and live in such a wonderful community. And I’d also like to give a special shoutout to Connor Zanini, one of our Science Fair mentors who always goes above and beyond for this program. Connor did so much work behind the scenes and was instrumental in making this all come together.”

PHOTO/JOHN CARDILLO