DENTON (UNT), Texas – Four students from the University of North Texas’ Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science earned awards for their research at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

    Intel ISEF is the world’s largest international pre-college science competition with 1,800 high school students from more 80 countries, regions and territories presenting their independent scientific research each year. 

   TAMS students were honored for their exceptional work in the fields of behavioral and social sciences, biomedical engineering, computational biology and bioinformatics and animal sciences.  

Here’s a list of their award-winning research:

• Julia Camacho developed a computational method to help with the prediction of secondary central nervous system cancer.
• Award: Camacho’s project, “Predicting the Development of Secondary Central Nervous System Cancer through Ensemble Learning Methods,” received fourth place and $500 in the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics category. 

• Rhythm Garg explored a more objective and cost-efficient way to diagnose autism at an early age by analyzing eye movement data during a virtual reality task using machine learning. 
• Awards: Garg’s project, “Diagnosing Autism with Machine Learning: Binary Classification for Eye Movement in Virtual Reality Environment,” took second place and $1,500 in the Behavioral and Social Sciences category and certificates of honorable mention for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Special Award and American Psychological Association Special Award. 

• David Yue came up with a faster, safer and more cost-effective medical scanning procedure with a lower ionizing radiation dosage than a CT scan.
• Awards: Yue’s project, “Stereoscopic Three-Dimensional X-Ray Reconstruction Processing: A Low-Radiation Cost-Effective Versatile Medical Imaging Procedure for Safe and Rapid Scanning,” earned third place and $1,000 in the Biomedical Engineering category as well as the Fondazione Bruno Kessler Award, which came with a trip to participate in the WebValley scientific research program in Italy.

• Zihan Zhao found a correlation between cisd gene family disruption and infertility in Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode worm used as a model organism in biological research. 
• Award: Zhao’s project, “The Effects of cisd Gene Family Disruption in Caenorhabditis elegans Fertility,” won $750 for the Air Force Special Award in Animal Sciences.