Five Jesuit Students Win First Place Awards at NWSE, Five Qualify for ISEF

Congratulations to our group of 14 students who attended NWSE (Northwest Science Expo) on April 5! Our students did an incredible job, with five first-place awards, two second-place awards, one third-place award, two honorable mentions, and six special awards. A special congratulations to the six students headed to ISEF (International Science and Engineering Fair) in May: Akash Ragam ’26, Anay Aggarwal ’26 & Manu Isaacs ’26, Siddharth D'Costa ’25 & Arjun Malpani (student partner from Sunset High School), and Shriya Pai ’26 (Gresham-Barlow STEM Expo winner). What incredible accomplishments for these young scientists!

First Place in State

• Shriya Pai ’26, Biochemistry
• Nidhi Yadalam ’26, Cellular and Molecular Biology
• Siddharth D’Costa ’25 & Arjun Malpani, Energy and Environmental Engineering
• Anay Aggarwal ’26 & Manu Isaacs ’26, Mathematical Sciences
• Akash Ragam ’26, Medicine and Health Sciences

Special Awards

• Outstanding Natural Resources Science Project: Sohan Govindaraju ’26, "Wildfire and Social Equity Based Risk Mitigation for Respiratory Health Vulnerability"
• Ricoh Sustainable Development Award: Siddharth D'Costa ’25 & Arjun Malpani, "Synthesis and Characterization of Property-Optimized Ionic Liquid for PostCombustion Carbon Capture Discovered via Novel Deep Learning Model"
• Tom Owen Award for Excellence in Statistics: Shriya Pai ’26, "Identification of Novel Target Genes and ML-based Drug Repurposing and Discovery for Alzheimer’s Disease in the Presence of Metabolic Comorbidities"
• Naval Excellence in Science and Engineering Award: Kevin Boriboonsomsin ’27, "Ocean Depth Image Resolution Enhancement Using Artificial Intelligence"
• Thermo Fisher Advancing Equity through Innovation: Arjun Agarwal ’26, “A Novel Fair Clustering Algorithm To Eliminate Bias In Machine Learning"

• Biomedical Science Award: Akash Ragam ’26, "FoGDTECT: A Novel Non-Invasive Freezing of Gait (FoG) Monitoring Solution Integrating Machine Learning and Mobile App Accelerometer Data"

Regeneron ISEF Awards

• ISEF Finalist - Physical Science: Anay Aggarwal ’26 & Manu Isaacs ’26, "An Elementary Method For Fast Modular Exponentiation With Factored Modulus,” 
• ISEF Finalist - Physical Science: Siddharth D'Costa ’25 & Arjun Malpani, "Synthesis and Characterization of Property-Optimized Ionic Liquid for Post-Combustion Carbon Capture Discovered via Novel Deep Learning Model"
• ISEF Finalist - Life Science: Akash Ragam ’26, "FoGDTECT: A Novel Non-Invasive Freezing of Gait (FoG) Monitoring Solution Integrating Machine Learning and Mobile App Accelerometer Data"
• ISEF Finalist  (Direct from GBSE): Shriya Pai ’26, “Identification of Novel Target Genes and ML-based Drug Repurposing and Discovery for Alzheimer’s Disease in the Presence of Metabolic Comorbidities” 

Jesuit has been competing at GBSE and NWSE for nine years under Dr. Lara Shamieh, Director of Student Science Research and biology teacher at Jesuit. Students have qualified for ISEF in eight of those nine years. This is Jesuit’s second year of sending five students to ISEF, a prestigious competition consisting of 1,600 students from 64 countries.