Three Saratoga High School seniors were named scholars in the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2024, the nation’s oldest science and math competition for high school seniors, and one is among 40 national finalists.
Esabella Fung, Zeyneb Kaya and Kyleen Liao are among the 300 scholars selected from 2,162 entrants from 712 schools, the highest number of entrants since 1969. Scholars were chosen based on their research projects, essays, academic achievements, leadership skills, community involvement and demonstration of creativity and promise as future leaders in STEM. Each scholar was awarded $2,000, and each school was awarded $2,000 for each scholar enrolled.
As a national finalist, Kaya will receive an additional monetary prize and go on to compete for even larger awards during a weeklong competition in Washington, DC.
Kaya’s project was titled “MADLIBS: A Novel Multilingual Data Augmentation Algorithm for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation.” Fung was recognized for “A Machine-Learning Approach for Assessing Labor Supply to the Online Labor Market, and Liao for “Simulating the Air Quality Impact of Prescribed Fires Using a Graph Neural Network-Based PM2.5 Emissions Forecasting System.”
“I am incredibly proud of these students for pursuing their passion toward STEM,” Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District Superintendent Bill W. Sanderson said in a statement. “Their diligence, passion and perseverance should be celebrated.”
