January 21, 2022
Three students named as top STEM scholars in competition
Yue ’22, Xiong ’22, and Yang ’22 recognized in the 81st Regeneron Science Talent Search (STS)by Nancy Hitchcock
The Society for Science named three PA students among 300 high school seniors as the nation’s top scientists in the 81st Regeneron Science Talent Search (STS). William Yue, Nathan Xiong, and Ali Yang were recognized for their exceptional scientific research in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). Regeneron is the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and mathematics competition for high school seniors.
This year, 1,804 students from around the the United States and several other countries entered the competition. The 300 scholars were chosen based on their exceptional research skills, commitment to academics, innovative thinking, and promise as future scientists as demonstrated through the students’ original submissions. Yang's submitted project was “Multimodal Contrastive Learning Matches the Transcriptome With Pathological Diagnoses”; Xiong’s project is titled “The Master Field and Free Brownian Motions”; and Yue’s project is “Reconstructing Spider trees from Traces Using Bivariate Littlewood Polynomials.”
Xiong is inspired to pursue STEM to help resolve global issues. For this project, he worked with a helpful mentor through the MIT PRIMES project, a high-school research program run by members of MIT’s math department. “I’m honored and excited to be named a Regeneron STS scholar,” says Xiong. “It’s humbling to be a part of such a dedicated group of students, scientists, and researchers who are working on tackling some of the biggest problems in the world today.”
Each of the 300 scholars will be awarded $2,000, and Phillips Academy will also receive $2,000 per scholar to use toward STEM-related activities.
“We are honored to celebrate this new generation of problem solvers who have demonstrated the depth of their innovative thinking, commitment to continuous learning, and ability to tackle global challenges in creative ways,” says Christina Chan, senior vice president, Corporate Communications & Citizenship at Regeneron.