LEXINGTON – Rachel Seevers, a senior at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, is one of four Grand Award Winners in the 2019 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), a program of Society for Science & the Public.
She is Kentucky’s first-ever top winner in this prestigious competition. Rachel received one of the two Intel Foundation $50,000 scholarships and Young Scientist Awards for designing, building, and testing a rigid, energy-efficient prototype of an underwater propulsion device that mimics the way jellyfish move through the water; it could allow for greater access to the world’s unexplored oceans.
Rachel Seevers (Photo from Intel ISEF)
Intel ISEF is the world’s largest international pre-college science competition. The mid-May contest in Phoenix, Arizona, featured over 1,800 top students selected from more than 80 countries, regions, and territories.
Rachel was also the category winner in Engineering Mechanics for her entry ENMC025 — Bioinspired Submersible Dual Propulsion System: A Novel Approach to Ultra-Efficient Submarine Propulsion Utilizing Starting and Stopping Vortex Rings Mirroring Jellyfish Motion. In addition, she received a Shanghai STEMCloud Award in Systems Software and earned an honorable mention from NASA.
Meanwhile, Dunbar classmate David Vulakh received special awards from the Air Force Research Laboratory and United Technologies Corp., as well as a third-place award in the Systems Software category. David’s entry was SOFT029 — General Distributed Backtracking Framework for Solving Combinatorial Constraint Satisfaction Problems.
A third student from Fayette County Public Schools, Theo Ehrenborg from Henry Clay High School, also qualified for the Intel ISEF in Mathematics. For questions about FCPS participants, please contact Eddie DeMoll at the University of Kentucky.
The top three award winners rejoice in their triumph at the 2019 Intel ISEF competition in Phoenix, Ariz. From left: Allison Jia, 17, from The Harker School in San Jose, Ca.; Krithik Ramesh, 16, from Cherry Creek High School in Greenwood Village, Co.; and Rachel Seevers. (Photo from Intel ISEF)
From Fayette County Public Schools
