The 75th International Science and Engineering Fair, the world's largest and most prestigious science competition, concluded with the Grand Awards ceremony in host city Columbus, Ohio. Over 30 million high school students from 1,600 affiliated fairs in 70 countries competed to qualify, of which only 1,700 students made it, including 10 from the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair, led by GSDSEF Board Member, Treasurer and Judging Captain, Sany Zakharia. These finalists competed for $9m in awards, with the GSDSEF delegation winning a total of 7 awards, including 2nd place, 3rd place and two 4th places, for a total of $46,800.

Detailed results below:

Behavioral and Social Sciences:

Hannah Im & Nupur Bhalla, Grade 11, Del Norte High School, "Optimizing Academic Burnout Mitigation: Statistical Modeling of Emotional Intelligence as a Protective Factor in Adolescents"

- ISEF Finalist

Biomedical and Health Sciences:

Saanvi Dogra, Grade 11, Del Norte High School, "Uncovering Molecular Mechanisms for Treatment of Congenital Heart Defects through High-Content Genetic Perturbation Screens"

- Grand Award: Fourth Award of $600

Anirudh Kalyanaraman, Grade 12, Mt. Carmel High School, "A Novel Treatment Approach to Mitigate Adverse Cardiovascular Effects of Burn Pit Exposure”

- ISEF Finalist

Lilian Zeng, Grade 11, Del Norte High School, "Identifying Bacteriophages, Nature's Own Secret Weapon Against Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria, for Achromobacter Treatment”

- ISEF Finalist

Biomedical Engineering:

Kayley Xu, Grade 10, The Bishop's School, “Wearable Stethoscope Array for Cardiopulmonary Sound Localization and Interference Suppression Using Beamforming”.

- Grand Award: Second Award of $2,400

- Special Award: Society for Science Alumni Award of $5k

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics:

Tarik Oguz, Grade 11, Del Norte High School, "Small Changes, Big Impact: miRNAs in Lung Cancer Detection"

- Grand Award: Fourth Award of $600

Physics and Astronomy:

Joe Smith, Grade 12, Stanford Online High School, “Lost in the Stars: Chemical Tagging of the Magellanic Clouds and Accreted Populations”

- Grand Award: Third Award of $1,200

Plant Sciences:

Anna Luo, Grade 11, Canyon Crest Academy, "Allelopathic Effects of Cynara cardunculus on Native Coastal Sage Scrub Species"

- Special Award: The New American University ISEF Scholarship of $32k

Robotics and Intelligent Machines:

Ryan Rezaei, Grade 11, Canyon Crest Academy, “Symmetry-Preserving Variational Autoencoder and Latent Space Rectified Flow Diffusion for Accelerated Materials Discovery With Geometric Graph Neural Networks and Integrated Property Network Multi-Layer Perceptron"

- Special Award: Midjourney of $5K

We are extremely proud of all our ISEF finalists, congratulations!

Read our press release.