The Minnesota State Science Engineering Fair celebrated its 80 year anniversary this past weekend. The fair is a three day event in which students from across Minnesota come to Minneapolis and share their science research posters and papers. St. Paul Academy and Summit School sent 6 students to this competition this year with Juniors Iya Abdulkarim, and Henry Zietlow as well as Senior Diane Huang winning awards. For these students to compete in the state fair they had to put in a lot of work inside and outside of the classroom running experiments and drawing conclusions from their results.

“My project was on zebrafish, testing zebrafish in particular.” Abdulkarim said.

Abdulkarim won a gold medallion for her poster presentation and finished in the top 5% of presentations, also winning the Wolfram Research Mathematica Software award. Both her and Zietlow won Seagate Emerging Scientist Awards for being in the top 10% of first year presenters at the fair.

“This has been personally really motivating in [the research] I’m doing this year and for next year,” Abdulkarim said.

Senior Diane Huang was recognized for the best 12th grade paper award sponsored by Graduate Women In Science for her paper “Evaluating Roof Runoff Contamination by Shingle Age”, and aditionally won a bronze medallion

The competition took place at the Marriot City Center in Minneapolis. On the first day the projects were set up and the papers were presented for judging. The second day the students presented their poster for over three hours to both judges and the public. The final day was the awards ceremony for the fair.

“This experience opened my mind to going to the [science] fair and I now feel more comfortable presenting my work,” Abdulkarim said.