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Rhoades School Students Excel at County Science Fair

All of the Grade 7 and 8 students from The Rhoades School qualified to compete at the 2020 Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair. Our 47 students earned 30 First Place Awards, 13 Second Place Awards, and four Third Place Awards. The students also received two Grand Awards, 60 Professional Society Awards, 24 State Nominations, and 18 National Nominations. Our students earned one third of all the middle school State Nominations and one third of all the middle school National Nominations presented by the fair!

The students conducted a wide variety of sophisticated science fair experiments, such as comparing the correlation strengths of phenotypes associated with Type 2 diabetes, building agricultural robotic devices, investigating microplastics in fish, documenting invasive plant species at a local lagoon, exploring blacktop coating impacts on reducing heat emissions and measuring how effectively various face masks blocked particulates. The students competed in a diverse range of categories, including Microbiology, Medicine and Health, Computer Science, Environmental Science, Animal Sciences, Behavioral and Social Sciences, Product Testing, Mathematical Sciences, Engineering and Physics and Astronomy; the results were phenomenal!

Each year, the county science fair selects four top projects to represent the very highest of student achievement. These elite projects are the “Grand Awards.” From nearly 500 middle school participants this year, Bhadra Rupesh (Grade 8) was honored with the prestigious “Grand Award in Life Science” for her project in the category of Medicine and Health titled, “Evaluating Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms in the Correlation of Phenotypes to Type 2 Diabetes.” Bhadra also earned a First Place Award, the San Diego Society of Health-System Pharmacists Award, a State Nomination and a National Nomination for her ingenious and ambitious work. Leia Ryan (Grade 8) earned one of the top eight prizes of the fair, receiving the “Runner-up Grand Award in Life Science” for her Behavioral Science project titled, “The Empathy Mechanism: Using a Quotient to Evaluate the Effects of Gender and Age.” Leia Ryan also earned a First Place Award, Professional Society Awards from the San Diego Psychological Association and the Association for Women in Science, a State Nomination and a National Nomination.

Congratulations to all the Rhoades School students for all of their tremendous work and for such a successful showing at this year’s Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair! To learn more about our students and their individual accomplishments, please click here.

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