Young scientists prepare for ISEF 2007

IN A FEW days, nine Filipino high school students will be meeting 1,500 of their counterparts from over 40 countries for the prestigious Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) to be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States.

This year also marks the 10th anniversary of the annual Intel Philippine Science Fair, the local version of the ISEF, which picks the country’s best young scientists and engineers in high school.

The country’s delegation to ISEF 2007, to be held on May 13 to 19, will compete in the Team and Individual categories and will be vying for scholarships, research grants, scientific field trips, internships and the grand prize of a $50,000 college scholarship.

Most of the winning entries that will represent the Philippines in ISEF 2007 are in the field of biology while one is focused on a mathematical project. As in previous years, topics in biology are the most commonly used topics by ISEF hopefuls. Click here for the project abstracts.

The group of Jane Suede, Charlotte Gamelong and Verna Joy Cabanero from Dona Hortencia Salas Benedicto National High School in Negros Occidental will be joining in the Team category. Their project involves the use of an extract from the oregano plant that can attract the parasitic wasp-like insect trichogramma that lays eggs in the bodies of crop-destroying stem borer insects. Trichogrammas have been used by horticulturists to kill stem borers so what the students did was to attract more trichogrammas into crop fields to destroy stem borer populations.

The second group for the Team category is composed of students from the Philippine Science High School Diliman Quezon City. These are Ivy Razel Ventura, Janine Santiago and Mara Elaine Villaverde and their research is heavy on pure research rather than on direct practical application. They focused on coming up with extraction process of fluorescent proteins from the sea slug nudibranch. The students said that nudibranchs may produce high concentrations of fluorescent proteins, which are used for biomedical research.

The Philippines will have three students joining the Individual category. Luigi John Suarez from Dona Hortencia Salas Benedicto National High School will show his project that involves creating antibacterial agents against rice diseases with the use of bioluminescent bacteria extracted from certain types of fish. Like his colleagues from the same school who are also hoping to protect rice fields from stem borers, Suarez’s project also hopes to do the same but this time, targeting certain types of rice diseases.

Likewise, Melvin Carlo Barroa is also aiming to extract antibacterial materials from fish mucus that can be used as antibiotics or to build immunity for humans. Having known that fish produce high concentrations of mucus that protect them from bacteria in water, Barroa stated that the same extract can be utilized by people against diseases.

The most distinct among the nine representatives is the project of Hester Mana Umayam from the Philippine Science High School Cagayan Valley Campus, whose project is in the very new field of “ethnomathematics,” a study of the relationship between human cultures and math. Umayam, who is hoping to get a degree in statistics in the University of the Philippines, said that her research brought her to the famed fabric weavers of Kalinga Apayao, where she found that the repeating patterns created in the fabric represent the social class, beliefs and practices of the Kalinga people and not just random weaving.

All of the students are hopeful that some of them would be winning in this year’s ISEF. Not surprisingly, the Philippines has been successful in winning at least one award every year since it joined.

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