Two brilliant Manhasset High School Seniors won the Siemens Competition, a national STEM showdown of America’s brightest young minds. Kimberly Te and Christine Yoo, Kimberly Te and Christine Yoo will share a $100,000 college scholarship for their project entitled Natural, Cost-Effective Anodes for Optimized Sediment Microbial Fuel Cells: Engineering a Novel Approach to Harvesting Energy and Cleaning Up Oil 
Spill Regions.
The team engineered a device made of natural, sustainable materials that cleans up oil-polluted areas, and uses the otherwise unusable oil to generate clean energy to be used to power remote sensors. Kimberly and Christine had previously studied the biological effects of pollution on organisms and wanted to focus their research on cleaning up pollutants, specifically oil. They devised an efficient and cost effective device that could degrade hydrocarbons, while also producing electricity – using a loofah sponge.
