Suie Choi ’20 Wins Two Awards at North Jersey Regional Science Fair
Newark Academy junior Suie Choi won a pair of awards at the 2019 Nokia Bell Labs North Jersey Regional Science Fair (NJRSF) at Rutgers University in New Brunswick on March 16 and 17 for her project, "Investigating Synergistic Effects of Residential Chemicals and Reversibility on Daphnia."
Suie was awarded the "Science Communication Award," which is sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Journal of Emerging Investigators and provides students with mentorship to help them communicate their work effectively and prepare manuscripts for publication in the Journal of Emerging Investigators. She also received the "NJIT Center for Pre-College Programming Academy College Courses Scholarship," a special award which is given to one sophomore or junior who is awarded with a one-time summer, fall, or spring semester tuition scholarship to enroll in one to three credit-bearing college courses through the Center for Pre-College Programs at NJIT. Credits are transferable to the college the student attends.
“It was such an amazing experience as it was the first time I presented my science research,” Suie said. “It was so cool to observe and listen to the other amazing science projects and it inspired me to pursue science research even more!”
“It was such an amazing experience as it was the first time I presented my science research,” Suie said. “It was so cool to observe and listen to the other amazing science projects and it inspired me to pursue science research even more!”
Her project was to show the effect of pesticides used in households that flow downstream into waterways, affecting the condition of aquatic organisms and eventually humans through the process of bioaccumulation. To do this, she tested different levels of pesticides on daphnia magna (an aquatic organism) cardiac level and behavioral movement. Its body is clear, so she was able to clearly see the heart under a microscope and she recorded on a microscope camera the behavioral movements, which she was later able to analyze through video.
“I am really interested in environmental science. I am a member of the Green and Blue Committee and I went to an environmental studies camp last summer where I learned about daphnia. They are primary consumers and abundant in aquatic habitats, so their ecological decline marks a signal of environmental issues,” Suie said when asked why she chose this particular project. “I also learned about the overuse of pesticides in households, so I wanted to test and show the affect the chemicals can have on organisms.”
The NJRSF is a high school student science competition in which students, individually or in groups, present a wide variety of projects. Most of the projects are investigative in nature, posing and attempting to answer some question or problem, either through experimentation and design or in a theoretical sense. All areas of science, math, and engineering are included. The fair accepts entries from ten counties of northern New Jersey: Bergen, Essex, Hunterdon, Middlesex, Morris, Passaic, Somerset, Sussex, Union, and Warren.
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