Biophysical Society Bulletin | May 2020

Communities and Outreach

Science Fairs The Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair, which took place March 13–14, is a STEM event in San Diego and includes activities designed to entice young minds with the guiles and lures of discovery. A climax of the event is the poster competition, open to students in grades 6-12 to present their experiments. The Fair has been attracting young minds for many decades, planting seeds in hopes that some may grow into inventors, scientists, engineers, into the tech- nological leaders of the next generation. This year’s competition featured a few newfound discoveries of a control group, the customary permutations of fingerprint sciences, and finally proof that your cell phone screen might make it a teeny bit harder to sleep at night, or at least take longer to achieve proper repose. Some participants surpassed their personal achievements and dove deep into the ocean of discovery. As one of the small battalion of volunteer judges interviewing the young competitors, it is always a pleasure to experience the energy and joy of discovery in all the students, but every year there are always a few posters of exceptional

accomplishments worthy of mention. This year we saw a pro- gram that used spectral data from satellite images to demon- strate the impact of cities on the ecology of our environment. There were multiple collaborations with university laboratories where the high school students took on their own projects to demonstrate a new method for measuring force of adhesion of membrane proteins, or to demonstrate software capable of automatically analyzing imaging data to diagnose pulmonary non-small-cell carcinomas with 93 percent accuracy. Other collaborations included running quantitative structure activity relationship analysis on a database of a handful of compounds targeting muscular dystrophy, to develop a template that was then used to screen a database of compounds approved for other indications, and identify just a dozen compounds that may potentially be repurposed for treatment of this disease. This year’s winner of the Biophysics Award, Kate Wang , became interested in Klebsiella pneumoniae last year during an eighth grade Science Olympiad competition. The prospect that this infection has shown resistance to even the strongest antibiotics scared her and she got curious about what options we may have left. Ultimately she came across artilysin pro- teins, then proceeded to perform an in-silico study to virtually screen a panel of compounds and produce hits with the best opportunity for success at finding a treatment with the lowest probability of producing resistant strains. The unchecked use of antibiotics around the world has produced resistant strains that are a real threat to people all over the world. Her method for in-silico screening could speed the development of new options for control based on proteins rather than continuing our reliance on failing small molecule antibiotics. It was quite an accomplishment for a ninth grade student with little scien- tific input from the infrastructure at the school, and without sponsorship and training from a university environment. It was a great example of ingenuity and productivity. — Antonio Guia The Biophysical Society aims to promote great minds and help to recruit new talent into the field, and would like to thank judges Antonio Guia and Peter Salamon for taking the time to help judge the posters at the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair!

Interested in being a Science Fair Judge? Visit your myBPS profile and update your “Get Involved” preferences.

Kate Wang, the winner of the Biophysics Award, displayed her poster at the 2020 Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair

May 2020

19

T H E N E W S L E T T E R O F T H E B I O P H Y S I C A L S O C I E T Y