Manhasset High students win awards in global competition

Four students from Manhasset High School have won awards in an international clean technology competition.

Sanjna Kedia and Emily Ma took second place in the Abundant Resources category of the 2020 Spellman High Voltage Electronics Clean Tech Competition. The pair took home $7,000 for their project relating to using a microbial fuel cell to remediate wastewater.

Two other Manhasset High students, Ava Balacek and Giovanna Mayo, won third place in the Limited Resources category of the contest, earning a $5,000 prize for their project titled “The Removal of Methylene Blue from Wastewater Utilizing Iron Oxide Nanoparticles and Coated Sand.”

All in all there were 20 finalist teams from the U.S., Canada, Singapore, the Philippines and India, which competed for a share of $60,000 in cash prizes.

Now in its ninth year, the competition is the only outcome-based STEM focused research and design challenge for pre-college students in the world. The program is managed by New York-based nonprofit Center for Science, Teaching & Learning, led by STEM Crusader and Advocate Dr. Ray Ann Havasy, and sponsored by New York-based Spellman High Voltage Electronics, a leader in high voltage technology in the medical, industrial and scientific fields.

More than 744 students, comprising 395 teams, registered for the competition and of those, 240 teams submitted projects for judging. This year’s competition theme, “Reducing Individual Impacts,” focused on ways to change the course of our environmental future.