Classical High senior wins regional STEM competition, going on to national competition

CLASSICAL HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR Joseph Zurier, second from right, is the individual category winner of the Siemens Competition regional event held at Georgia Institute of Technology. He advances to the national finals in Washington, D.C. From left to right, Joseph Montoya, professor and associate chair for undergraduate affairs, School of Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology, and lead judge for Siemens Competition Region Six Finals; Ken Cornelius, president, Cities Center of Competence, Americas, Siemens; Zurier; and David Etzwiler, CEO, Siemens Foundation. / COURTESY SIEMENS CORPORATION
CLASSICAL HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR Joseph Zurier, second from right, is the individual category winner of the Siemens Competition regional event held at Georgia Institute of Technology. He advances to the national finals in Washington, D.C. From left to right, Joseph Montoya, professor and associate chair for undergraduate affairs, School of Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology, and lead judge for Siemens Competition Region Six Finals; Ken Cornelius, president, Cities Center of Competence, Americas, Siemens; Zurier; and David Etzwiler, CEO, Siemens Foundation. / COURTESY SIEMENS CORPORATION

PROVIDENCE – A Classical High School senior has won a $3,000 scholarship after earning top honors in a national Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) competition in Georgia recently.
Joseph Zurier, of Providence, has been named a national finalist in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology for his research solving an open-ended math problem. He won the individual category for his project, “Generalization of the Joints Program.”
He solved the problem by counting the number of intersections of lines and planes in space, improving on previous results.
“One of Joseph’s main outcomes was to show that, in a mathematically precise sense, a certain number of lines cannot create too many joints. This will have implications for digital image processing both in general computer science and medical imaging,” a press release about the event stated.
Eva K. Lee, professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare at Georgia Institute of Technology, said Joseph’s approach was “very novel and elegant – an overall very smart idea.”
“His work is remarkable and beautiful. The quality of his work is at least at the doctorate level; this is not something a high school student would normally be able to address,” she said.
Joseph leads his school’s math team and is captain of the state American Regions Mathematics League. He also is an avid runner and plays tennis.
Math is Joseph’s favorite subject because of its creativity, and because math is philosophically universal. His father helped to foster Joseph’s love of math and science at a young age by teaching him math problems and tricks.
“I like science because of its ability to improve the human condition – we’ve advanced tremendously in just centuries, decades even, on the back of technology,” Joseph said.
Joseph’s mentor is Ben Yang, a Ph.D. student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
The students presented their research this past weekend to a panel of judges from the Georgia Institute of Technology, host of the Region Six Finals. They will now present their work on a national stage in Washington, D.C., Dec. 5-9, where $500,000 in scholarships will be awarded, including two top prizes of $100,000.
The Siemens Competition, a signature program of the Siemens Foundation, is administered by Discovery Education.
“These incredible students have invested significant time and energy to advance research and exploration in critical fields,” David Etzwiler, CEO of the Siemens Foundation, said in a statement. “I commend the finalists for their outstanding achievements and wish them luck in the next phase of the competition.”
Jason Lee and Allen Lee, juniors at Millburn High School in Millburn, N.J., and David Lu, a junior at Mills E. Godwin High School in Henrico, Va., won the team category and will share a $6,000 scholarship for their project, titled “Identification of compounds to overcome carbapenemase-related multidrug resistance in Enterobacteriaceae.”
This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Siemens Competition, the nation’s premier research competition for high school students.
A record 4,428 students registered for this year’s competition and submitted a total of 1,784 projects for consideration; 408 students were named semifinalists and 97 were named regional finalists, representing 38 states. Entries are judged at the regional level by esteemed scientists from six leading research universities which host the regional competitions: California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Notre Dame and The University of Texas at Austin.

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