Yulhee Kwon (left), Rudra Pachori (center) and Jacob Wu stand in front of their project. PHOTO/JERRY SPAR

Yulhee Kwon, Rudra Pachori and Jacob Wu took first place in the Hopkinton High School Science & Engineering Fair, which was held Feb. 4 at the HHS cafeteria.

The winners’ project was titled “Noninvasive Inference of Presymptomatic Plant Stress from Latent Electrophysiological Dynamics via Action Potential-Based Logistic Regression.”

Taking second place was Pahlaj Sharma for “Kinetic Energy Harvester to Power Small Devices,” while third place went to Devon Striek, Sreenisha Rajesh and Hari Lingam for “Sense and Defense.”

The Valerie Lechtanski Prize for Perseverance was awarded to Siya Agrawal, Navya Gupta, and Preesha Panchamia for “Nutrient Gaps, Neural Maps!”

In addition to the four projects above, regional qualifiers also included “Simulating Coastal Ecosystems: The Impact of pH, Salinity, and Nutrients on Calcium Carbonate Dissolution” by Hareesh Krishnasamy, Lindsay Xie and Lumen Zhang; “Stay or Stray: Can AI + Genes = Clues to Breast Cancer Metastasis?” by Jaya Sakkari and Vanya Bharadwaj; “The Effect of Preservatives on the Fruit Fly Microbiome and Mental Health” by Jackson Cafazzo, Ananya Goswamy and Kenley Silva; “Recovery of Dialysis Tubing Filtration after Heat Stress” by Samanvitha Vangala, Swara Patkar and Nitya Sunku; “How Does Applying a Weak Electrical Force to the Blood Brain Barrier System Make Drug Delivery More Efficient and Sufficient?” by Arjun Mehta and Sahaj Pogula; “Does the Protein to Carbohydrate Ratio in Diet Accelerate Planarian Tail Regeneration?” by Sana Kandasamy and Parnika Rai; “The Effects of Common Synthetic Food Dyes on Freshwater Ecosystems” by Pranay Sindhwani and Jonathan Yan; and “BioPLEASE” by Thomas Qingxu Pan.