Since its inception nearly five years ago, the Advanced Science Research (ASR) Program at Belmont Hill has flourished into a forum for juniors and seniors to participate in innovative, undergraduate-level research at world-class institutions. This May, the fourteen seniors in the program participated in the annual ASR poster night, offering presentations of their research and defending their work. With topics ranging from Gene Therapy (David Yellen ‘16), to the Computer Modelling of Meniscus (Conor Ghazaleh ‘16), the boys provided parents, faculty, and students alike with tremendous insight into their endeavors for the past one to two years.
Looking to the future of the program, beginning next year the “one-year track” will be discontinued, in an effort to focus on improving the growing two-year program. Spending their entire junior year, the subsequent summer, and most of their senior year in their labs, boys on the two-year track will have the time to refine their technical skills before delving into focused research; with each boy spending six weeks of their summer in their lab before applying for the Intel National Science Talent Search in the fall of senior year, the renewed focus on the two-year program hopes to continue to improve the ASR experience.
Joined by eight members of the Class of 2018 next year, the boys in the program hope to continue the legacy of their predecessors and are looking forward to another year of impressive research, learning, and growth.
ASR Projects – Class of 2016
Brennan Adler: “Inducing Gene Expression in Human Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Adipocytes”
Alex Afeyan: “Extreme EMT: Effects of EMT TF Knockouts”
Matt Armstrong: “IRF6 and Personalized Medicine for Cleft Lip and Palate”
Bhawramaett Broehm: “Optimizing Therapeutic Nanoparticles for the Treatment of Atherosclerosis”
Juan Carlos Fernandez del Castillo: “Categorizing Orthotopic Murine Models of MTC”
Connor Ghazaleh: “Modeling the 3D Displacement of the Human Meniscus”
Lucas Jurgensen: “Evolving Search: Genetic Algorithms for Visual Search Tasks”
Spencer Kim: “Non-Invasive Detection of Breast Cancer”
Ethan McIlhenny: “Examining CD25 Deficient T regulatory Cells”
Vishnu Nair: “Patient Monitoring: A Novel Template-Based Detector for Activity Classification”
Brendan Pulsifer: “Face-Name Association Learning in Autosomal Dominant Alzheimer’s Disease”
Sean Rayment: “Developing a Tissue Segmentation Plugin for OsiriX”
Harrison Rohrer: “Adolescent Neuroimaging: Behavioral Implications of Structure”
David Yellen: “Gene Therapy Approaches to Neurological Diseases”
