Following their first-place finish in the Hopkinton High School Science Fair on March 1, the team of Dylan Striek, Rylee Blair and Disha Mudenur captured second place at the March 10 regional Science Fair at WPI with their project titled “Electrolytic Extraction of Dawsonite from Ocean Water: Efficient Saltwater Mineral Recovery through Electrolysis.”

The trio earned a spot in the state-level event May 5 at MIT, and will compete in a playoff for the International Science Fair.

Five HHS teams won prizes at the regional event — including four that placed in the top 15 — and earned spots in the state competition.

In addition to the team of Striek, Blair and Mudenur taking second place, three HHS individuals received third-place prizes: Sahithi Pogula for “In Silico SALL4 Oncogene Overexpression Correlation to Non-Coding RNA Post-Transcriptional Regulation and Epigenetic Control,” 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” and Juliet Findlen for “Chlorella vulgaris as a model for photobioreactor use in industrial carbon removal.”

Additionally, the team of Briana Mallouh, Tomo Oga and Avani Daga received honorable mention for “Next Time-Step Pollution Level Prediction Using Custom Recurrent Neural Networks.”