Four seniors from Herricks High School’s class of 2026 were honored as Regeneron students for their research and accomplishments in science.
Their research, ranging from neuroscience to electroengineering to artificial intelligence, earned national recognition – an honor only awarded to 300 students nationwide.
The students, Aarthi Palaniappan, Abigail Thomas, Eli Jacob and Emma Su, each received a $2,000 prize, as well as $2,000 grants each for the science program at Herricks.
From the pool of 300 scholars, 40 finalists will be announced Jan. 21. Finalists will travel to Washington, D.C., in March to present their research, with winners announced March 10. The top prize is $250,000.
Palaniappan, this year’s valedictorian and student body treasurer, researched calcific aortic valve disease and the role of a specific gene in preventing it.
She reached out to a lab at Einstein Hospital, studied mouse tissue using staining, and contributed to the researchers’ finding that the Wnt4 gene is beneficial and helps prevent the progression of calcific aortic valve disease.
Palaniappan, an avid jigsaw puzzler, said that one of her most novel findings came from a PCR test, which showed that intercellular signaling was involved in cells where the disease had progressed most.
Emma Su, a senior and the current student body president at Herricks, engineered a device that measures and automatically adjusts imperfect frequencies in fMRI brain scanners. She said that he novel adaptive tuning model improved the image quality of scans in every case.
She said her circuit increased quality by 41%, indicating that it successfully reduced interference from varying frequencies when targeted memory reactivation was studied with fMRI.
Abigail Thomas studied Parkinson’s disease and delved into a molecular pathway to understand cognitive, nonmotor symptoms, which can show up early in the disease progression.
“Understanding how these symptoms develop would allow future targeted therapies to be developed targeting early symptoms,” she said.
Eli Jacob focused on a pressing issue nationwide: artificial intelligence in schools. He designed an experiment to understand student attitudes towards the use of AI for academic dishonesty.
Jacob said he recruited 130 participants online and used questions to determine that there are no statistically significant differences among groups’ opinions on students using AI. He said he found that opinions were more easily swayed in the social media space regarding general-use AI.
Palaniappan said she plans to attend the University of Pennsylvania and research more genes similar to Wnt4, contributing to advanced therapies and increased access to treatments for patients.
Thomas, a softball pitcher since age 8, said she wants to continue neuroscience research in college, with an additional focus on biology or neurodegenerative diseases. She said she hopes to pursue a career in the medical field and has considered becoming a neurologist.
Jacob, who will sing in the ACDA All-Eastern Honors Choir and is in the all-county choir, said he hopes to pursue a career in medicine, either in neurology or dermatology. He said interdisciplinary studies are important, and plans to integrate biology and psychology into his studies.
Su said she will attend Columbia’s School of Engineering after High School, where she plans to study electrical engineering.
“I hope to go back into biomedical engineering and continue making those devices that improve people’s lives,” she said. “I think electrical engineering will give me the fundamental electrical theory that I’ll need to make those kinds of things.”
She said that some of her favorite memories have been organizing Battle of the Classes events through the student government.
