Scientifically speaking, there’s a good chance that the next great scientist could have some strong ties to South Philly’s Grays Ferry neighborhood.
Universal Audenried Charter School on Tasker Street recently celebrated multiple awards at the George Washington Carver Science Fair last month. Award winners ranged in fields of environmental science, zoology and medicine and health. Each student related their project’s inspiration to something close to their personal lives.
For sophomore Amieda Momoh, it was attempting to create medical technology for people who can’t afford it. She created a heart monitor using simple supplies like a processor, a USB cord and a computer.
“Basically it was about making a heart rate monitor that is efficient and affordable for low-income families who can’t afford a commercial heart monitor because they are very expensive,” she said. “I made it basically with three or four things.”
Momoh’s parents are from the Western Africa country of Sierra Leone. She based her project on creating a heart monitor that could be assembled with resources that people anywhere could attain.
“My father has heart problem and we can’t afford a $3,000 heart monitor,” Momoh said. “But another reason is my parents are from Africa and they didn’t really have electricity or anything like that there. So if we can get solar panels to power the heart rate monitor, it would be very good for places like hospitals.”
Momoh won first place in medicine and health for her invention. She also took home two individual awards that were complemented with a monetary prize. Her classmate Awa Tanti Sidibe took third place in the same category but also received the Hook Family Innovation Award, which is given to the project that shows creative and particular use of technology. In addition, she won the Emma Chew Award for exceptional work in environmental science.
Sidibe’s project predicts, prescribes and prevents thyroid cancer using AI medicine.
“I was able to get about 98 percent accuracy, showing that my model was able to separate patients who have thyroid cancer and patients who don’t have it so I can predict whether a patient would have thyroid cancer reoccurrence,” she said.
Sidibe said her mother and aunt had breast cancer.
“A lot of people that I know who had cancer are really scared of it reoccurring and they don’t want to go through that process,” Sidibe said.
Audenried’s Science Instructional Coach Hollis Armstead, who teaches science at the school and moderated participation in the science fairs, also had cancer. Armstead had acute lymphoblastic leukemia but has been in remission for 10 years. She was part of Sidibe’s inspiration for her project.
“I was very proud,” Armstead said. “It’s something I try to bring to the table to spread awareness sometimes. And it opens up that you probably know somebody who has had cancer or is being treated or passed away from it. For them to use AI to look at something that is not going away and bring it to the table as a way to help us is really innovative and shows the future of what science is.”
In total, seven Audenried students won awards at the George Washington Carver Science Fair including Ja’Kiyah Wright, Kierra Shaw, Lynden Bui, Dehwen Youlo and Grace Lackey.
Shaw and Bui teamed up for a project on germs and won first place in the category of team projects.
“We went to find where germs are harbored the most,” Shaw said. “First we went to McDonald’s and swabbed the kiosk because that’s where people at our school order from. It’s high-tech so we wanted to use it.”
They also tested public bathrooms, stair railings and phones.
“We touch our phones all day,” Shaw said. “We basically tallied up everything and put it on a data chart.”
Then they started dreaming a step further.
“I found that we weren’t really solving the problem so I researched UVC lights and saw that they remove germs,” Shaw said. “I basically created a template talking about how we could put UV lights into things like the little robots that move along the floor and clean. After it sweeps dirt, it could also sterilize the whole area.”
Youlo, a freshman, won first place in environmental science, exploring the effects of carbon dioxide.
“My project was taking a look at a cost-effective, but also a local-level solution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since we know that it affects global greenhouse emissions,” she said. “As someone living in this generation and suffering the biggest consequences of this, I thought it was necessary for me to do something to mitigate the cost of it.”
Lackey, another freshman, took first in zoology for studying caterpillars and butterflies.
“We had to freeze them and cut them open to get data on the regeneration,” Lackey said. “We had some mixed results and I was scared I actually wouldn’t place in the science fair, but results are results.”
Sophomore Ja’kiyah Wright placed second in environmental science for her work on studying the effects of tree canopies in urban areas. Wright compared her home playground near 8th and Diamond Streets in North Philly with a much greener Markward Playground near the Schuylkill River.
“When there’s a lack of a tree canopy in the neighborhood, specifically in a lot of neighborhoods that tend to be in more poverty, it makes the neighborhood more hot,” Wright said. “There’s not much information out there specifically about how trees help in wintertime. In the colder months it gets really bad and I live in one of those areas I tested it on.”
Wright found a 10-degree difference as her neighborhood, without many trees, was much hotter in the summer and much colder in the winter.
“There’s definitely a difference simply on how many trees are in your neighborhood,” she said. “It’s important to me because anything that can be fixed environmentally, especially if it affects these neighborhoods with a lot of minorities.”
Students first competed in a science fair at Audenried before heading to Carver. The students were able to consult other teachers in the school to help with their presentations that were given before a live judging panel.
It took a village to raise a bunch of award winners.
“It speaks volumes of Audenried how all the teachers worked together to help the students,” Armstead said. “It doesn’t just stem from science, it comes from public speaking and learning how to do research. It’s really a team effort.”
