On Mar. 15, Schreiber High School’s annual Schreiber Fair took place from periods 2 to 6 in different parts of the building.  The annual research competition featured students’ projects from all three of Schreiber’s research programs: math, science, and social science.  Students worked over a span of months to conduct their research, analyze their data, and create their presentations on tri-fold boards. Members of science and social science research were also required to submit a video outlining their projects.  

The competition was organized by the seniors of each of the research programs: Sarika Israni for social science, Kayla Caplin and Dani Seidman for science, and Robert Novak, Ben Schiff, Max Garmisa, and Abraham Franchetti for math.  Throughout the building, research students took turns presenting their studies to a panel of senior research students and teachers of that department.  The projects were judged by a common rubric used in many other research competitions, and after all the presentations had been completed, the judges ranked the projects and the winners were announced.

The social science research competition featured the ten juniors, and they worked in pairs beginning in September to collect data and create their presentations.  Susanna Keiserman and Mikayla Schwartz placed first, and their study sought to discover how the presence of gendered traits in teachers might affect students’ perceptions of their credibility and how that relationship may differ based on student gender.  The study also looked at how teachers’ perceived credibility may be altered as a result of them sharing their opinions with the class and how that relationship is affected by students’ strength of opinion on current events and controversial issues.  Adam Lee and Sydney Flisser placed second in the competition with their study on how parental involvement influences student music participation, and Bryson Shaub and Joseph Asselta received an honorable mention for their study regarding financial literacy.

In the science research competition, junior Lucas Milgrim placed first with his study on reaction time and how it changes based on different wavelengths of light in planaria. Junior Samuel Kassan and sophomore Sarah Lucas came in second place for their individual studies.  Kassan used planaria and an electromagnet to measure the antioxidant effects of different flavonoids and inadvertently found a new characteristic of flavonoids that has yet to be studied. Lucas investigated the effects of temperature and temperature duration of Galleria mellonella and Tenebrio molitor larvae on their gut bacterial growth.  Juniors Emily Bersin and Samantha Friedler came in third place with their study on microscopic worms, known as C. Elegans, in which they used caffeine to increase levels of a messenger molecule, cAMP, because it can regenerate damaged central nervous system neurons.

Like the science competition, the math competition featured both juniors and sophomores.  Rigel Mummers, won gold for the juniors by creating a robot that trades in the stock market using a neural network.  Jack McNaughton and Reed Paltrow won silver for their studies, and Brandon O’Neill, Solomon Graf, and Chloe Fanous were awarded bronze in the competition.  For the sophomores, Tej Parekh won gold with his study on overflow and runoff using coding, Advait Nair and Averie Masia won silver, and Harrison Roth, Austin Hyde, and Ian Laurence all won bronze.

“Schreiber Fair was really great practice for future research competitions.  Between the sophomores, seniors, and teachers, it was also great to get feedback from people with a variety of research experience and to see what questions they had,” said junior Susanna Keiserman.