Win32 Virus Removal

During sixth period on Tuesday, Ward Melville students Anna Sato and Emmanuel Kim delivered a presentation that ordinarily may have flown over the heads of many. It was entitled "High-Flux Microfiltration Nanofibrous Membranes for Bacteria and Virus Removal." Say that five times fast.

But their peers simply took notes on the presentation and engaged them with thoughtful questions afterwards. It's all in a mid-morning's work for the kids in Ward Melville High School's InSTAR program, an elite three-year program which gives students the opportunity to explore a variety of sciences and complete high-caliber research projects in preparation for college.

Sato and Kim are two of Ward Melville's four regional Siemens-Westinghouse finalists who later this week will head to Carnegie Mellon University to contend for the chance to become a national finalist in the prestigious science competition. Lately, they have all been focusing on fine-tuning their presentations leading up to the event.

Sato, a junior, and Kim, a senior, developed an inexpensive, biodegradable and highly effective water filtration method which removes more than 99 percent of bacteria and viruses from water by utilizing the concept of particles' positive and negative charges. They were mentored by two chemistry professors, Dr. Benjamin Chu and Dr. Benjamin Hsiao, and graduate student Ran Wang from Stony Brook University, along with assistance from Brookhaven National Laboratory. The bulk of the work was completed over the summer, a process which Sato and Kim compared to having a full-time job.

"Putting it together, it was a lot of time and effort and lack of sleep," said Sato, who also studies viola at Juilliard on the weekends.

Sato and Kim will be joined at the competition by seniors Nevin Daniel and Kevin Chen, who each completed individual projects. Chen studied fruit fly genetics, discovering that two separate fruit fly gene systems communicate and control the development of embryos – a discovery which he also found to be applicable in human genetics. Daniel, who was recently featured in Popular Science magazine as one of the top high school inventors in the nation, worked to create a new cancer drug which targets specific cancer cells and applies a high amount of active chemotherapeutic.

At the helm of the InSTAR program is Dr. George Baldo, a former assistant professor of biophysics at Stony Brook University whom the district recruited to redesign its research program, once known as West Prep. It's his job to expose students to the different disciplines of science, connect them with mentors at universities and laboratories, and oversee the their entries into competitions like Intel and Siemens-Westinghouse.

Since Baldo formally launched InSTAR in 1998, it has yielded over $1 million in scholarship awards to its students and more than $125,000 in grants to the school itself. The program produced nine Intel semifinalists in its first year, hitting a peak of 13 Intel semifinalists in 2007-08. Last year, Ward Melville's Ruoyi Jiang was the national Siemens-Westinghouse winner, taking home a $100,000 scholarship.

Despite the budget-driven reassignment of two teachers from the InSTAR program this year to other positions in the school, Baldo said the district is squarely behind InSTAR, considered one of the flagship programs at the school.

"This past year we got cut a fair bit with the budget problems, but overall the Board of Education, the administration and the community support the program strongly," he said.

The program is certainly well-respected, Baldo said, but perhaps a bit mysterious.

"I think the program and the students in the program are not well understood other than they are known as scary bright people, who do these projects [some] can't understand, who are going to save us down the road," he said. "Part of my job is to translate what these kids do to a more understandable level in lay terminology."

Regardless of the fact that they are enrolled in InSTAR, Kim said, they are kids first and foremost.

"It's a goofy situation, because we're supposed to do all this great work and compete," he said, "but we're also just kids. We hang out. We still go out, have fun, goof around."