Research Night Again Showcases McCallie’s Best and Brightest Minds

 

As senior day student Joshua Kim was wrapping up a brief discussion of his internationally recognized project on nanoparticles for enhanced mRNA at Monday’s second annual Research Night program inside Walker Hall, he paused for a moment to recognize the role his teachers have played in his education.

 

“What’s really special about us, about McCallie research,” said Kim, who will be the first McCallie student in close to a decade to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this coming fall, “is that we’re always encouraged to find a topic we’re passionate about to research.”

 

“I think that’s 100 percent of the reason we dominate (archrival) Baylor every single time in these science competitions. Our teachers give us the freedom to pursue the research projects we care about, then provide us with so much guidance and support to help us be successful.”

 

Those successes could be found all over Walker Hall during Research Night. There was senior boarding student Everett Guo, who could be found scribbling math equations at roughly the speed of light on a giant white greaseboard, his joy in explaining his work to wide-eyed adults that of a young child on Christmas morning. 

 

Guo, who will attend Stanford this fall, hasn’t always had the competition success of Kim, but one unnamed teacher has an interesting explanation. “His enthusiasm sometimes has his explanations to judges’ questions moving faster than they can understand,” the teacher explained. “They think he’s cheating but he’s just that much smarter than everybody else. His mind is always racing.”

 

On this night, Guo, who grew up in Shanghai, China, is attempting to explain a math formula called the Tambara-Yamagami category. If you think a mere mortal can grasp this, consider this explanation about Tambara-Yamagami from the website mathoverflow.net: “The Tambara-Yamagami categories are those with fusion ring Z where A is an abelian group and M is a non-invertible (simple) object such that MA = AM = M.”

 

Piece of cake, right?

 

And just in case you’re wondering, Guo also has a large greaseboard mounted on the wall of his Burns Hall dorm room for when inspiration strikes him.

 

Said Guo of what he’s liked best about his years on the Ridge, “McCallie gives me a lot of free time to explore what interests me.”

 

Mechanical engineering interests senior day student Nolen Samuel, who’ll be heading off to the University of Tennessee later this year. Five weeks ago he began building  a hand-cranked generator.

 

 “I eventually want to design cars, and this is the first step to understanding how they work,” he said. “This means a lot to me.”

 

Not all of Research Night was devoted to science projects. Dr. Duke Richey’s history students, who once again dominated the state’s National History Day competitions, were displaying their projects, as well, including junior Sawyer Hazlewood’s deep dive into the Somers Mutiny titled “How a Failed Uprising Changed the U.S. Navy,” which won first prize at the state level and will advance him to the national competition in June at the University of Maryland.

 

Briefly, it’s the story of how the son of then-Secretary of War John C. Spencer, one Phillip Spencer, was put to death at sea for what his captain believed was inciting a mutiny aboard the USS Somers in 1842. The resulting furor changed the Navy forever.

 

“I’ve always been interested in sailing and pirate stuff,” said Hazlewood. “I worked on this for two-and-a-half months. It didn’t seem like a project. It was fun.”

 

Richey had originally steered Hazlewood toward a paper on the Seminole Wars, but admitted on Monday night, “Sawyer obviously made the right choice. I always tell our guys to pick a topic they’re passionate about. Don’t pick a fashionable topic. Don’t pick a topic you think the judges will like. Pick something you care about and you’ll do fine.”

 

He also tells them to never be afraid to revise and improve their projects after the judges’ critiques if their projects are selected to move to the next round, which is what happened with junior Camp Lehn’s 10-minute video on the birth of the Road America auto racing track in Wisconsin, which is still used today after first opening in 1955.

 

“Camp’s project was actually second in the regional,” Richey said. “After the judges’ remarks, he tweaked it for state, and won his way to the nationals. One thing our students are really good at: In these competitions, they know how to talk to smart people; they’re at ease talking to adults.”

 

As the night reached its high point, junior Maxim Lee and Kim spoke about their projects to a room largely filled with adults, including McCallie faculty members Dr. Ashley Posey, Dr. Courtney Fernandez, Jake Altemus, Caleb Bagby, Suzie Howick, Ricky Thomas, Andrew Voss, Alisa Watkins, as well as several parents.

 

Lee spoke about his project, “The Characterization of GPR109A and GPR 43 as Regulators of Human Macrophage IL-6 Secretion.” Kim gave further details on his project that’s entering its third year concerning “Investigating Dendrimersome Nanoparticles for Enhanced mRNA Transfection in Vitro.”

 

Sitting in the audience during these presentations were Nolen Samuel’s parents Teena and George Samuel.

 

Asked what they thought of these research projects their son and others had created, they turned their attention to the teachers who’d taught them.

 

“They offer so much here,” said Teena. “The teachers are excellent.”

 

“They’ve challenged our son a lot,” added George.

 

Asked if they were pleased they’d made the sacrifices necessary to send Nolen to McCallie for four years, they both smiled and said almost instantly, “We’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

 

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