GSH Special Awards at the Annual Science and Engineering Fair Houston

By Peter Lanzarone, NextGen

GSH Special awards judges getting ready to review student posters at the G.R.B. convention center.

The Science and Engineering Fair Houston (SEFH) is always a fun and exciting event! 2022 brought back an in-person competition at the George R. Brown Convention Center after being virtual in 2021.

This year we had six GSH members who served as special awards judges, three each for junior and senior divisions. A big thank you to Michael Martinez, Denis Marchand, Huw James, Syed Mehdi and Ken Green for serving as judges this year.

As we see every year at this event, there are a myriad of exceptional presentations, and it’s always very difficult to select winners with ‘geophysically-oriented’ projects. After hours of scanning projects and interviewing students, we selected the following award winners:

First Place Senior Division: Using Image Segmentation to Detect Microcalcifications in Breast Cancer.

Second Place Senior Division: Engineering and Simulating Mitigation Techniques for the Kauai and Niihau Islands.

First Place Junior Division: PinkRibbon: A Novel Method for Breast Cancer Detection using Machine Learning and Convolutional Neural Networks.

Second Place Senior Division: Best material to Capture Carbon Dioxide.

First place for both Juniors and Seniors received $50 Amazon gift cards and second place winners received $25 gift cards. We see a bright future for budding geophysicists in the Houston area and hope that these special awards increase the visibility of the geophysics discipline and GSH to the students and community at large.

#nextgen #sciencefair #sefh #outreach #students