December 1, 2021
Ritsumeikan High School, Kyoto, hosted 63 schools from 23 countries and regions during the first week of November 2021. Science project presentations from senior Hannah Johnson and junior Sachleen Tuteja utilized recorded video while senior Siddharth Tiwari was selected to give a live Zoom presentation; one student from each school was chosen by their faculty member to present using a live format. SIR co-lead Dr. Sowmya Anjur also participated in the teacher’s exchange session. Links to the presentations and abstracts can be viewed in the digital commons reference links below.
Hannah Johnson presented her research on Fragment-Based Drug Discovery of SARS-CoV-2 Therapeutics under Dr. John Thurmond, IMSA. You can watch Hannah’s presentation, which further explains the next step in her abstract – “The most promising compounds designed from the criteria will move forward for synthesis. Additionally, these compounds will likely collaborate with the COVID Moonshot consortium toward possible preparation and distribution for assays against the main protease (MPro).
Visit: https://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/student_pr/86/
Sachleen Tuteja presented her project – “The Enigma of Clinical Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) based Genetic Testing Variant Annotation Tools: A Performance Evaluation Study,” which evaluated the performance of two variant annotation tools (Variant Effect Predictor and Alamut Batch) for implementation in the clinical bioinformatics pipeline at the Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory at Lurie Children’s Hospital. Sachleen works under the direction of two professionals: Dr. Kai Lee Yap, Director of Molecular Diagnostics at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Assistant Professor of Pathology at Northwestern University, and Dr. Sabah Kadri; Director of Computational Genomics, AbbVie.
Visit https://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/student_pr/87/
Siddharth Tiwari’s project – “On the relationship between pain variability and relief in randomized clinical trials,” led to this conclusion – “Researchers and clinicians should not rely on using baseline pain variability as a prognostic factor for improvement following placebo.” His mentors, Dr. Andrew D. Vigotsky and Dr. A. Vania Apkarian, are from Northwestern University:
