by John Osborn and George Lewinnek ·
Friday, March 13, 2026
From left: Seniors Evan Burek, Owen Balsis, and Harrison Binnick stand ready to present their project on tire traction. They tested different tire types on a model vehicle driving on a variety of surface conditions to find which tires have the best traction for each condition. (Photos by Hannah Taylor unless otherwise noted)
The combination lock on a Bromfield School locker takes up to 30 seconds to open. During a four-minute passing period between classes, that matters. It matters even more when you forget the combination, or the lock breaks, and all that muscle memory goes to waste.
Tenth-graders Donovan Smith and Roman Muller-Juez decided to try a more contemporary approach. Their solution—a key card system using a $5 Raspberry Pi microcontroller, a radio-frequency identification reader, and a solenoid bolt—cost $74 to build, but could be replicated, they estimate, for roughly $10 per locker at scale. Outfitting the entire high school wing—all 500 lockers—would run about $5,000, they told the Press.
One constraint shaped their prototype: They weren’t permitted to drill into the lockers or run wires to electrical outlets. The battery pack that powers the unit was taped to the door because the school said no to permanent modifications. “We would have soldered it in,” Muller-Juez said, “but we can’t.” Working within those limits, the two taught themselves circuit design using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, then purchased and assembled the components from scratch. Anthropic’s Claude wrote the code they needed to operate the microcontroller.
The project won the Marc Thompson Memorial Award, presented by the Parent Teacher Organization for outstanding engineering. The award honors Dr. Marc Thompson, an electrical engineer who served for years as a PTO science fair judge and later as the PTO team’s judge coordinator. After his death, the PTO established the award in his memory; each year it goes to a project that best exemplifies his interests—hands-on engineering or a focus on rural challenges. Recipients receive a certificate, a cash prize, and have their names and project title engraved on a plaque displayed in the Bromfield science department.
Junior Misha Kalava studied the effects of social media content on high school athletic performance.
Their project was one of 78 on display March 6 at this year’s Bromfield School Science Fair—up from 51 projects last year, a jump that made this year’s fair one of the largest in recent memory. The projects, clustered three to a table, filled the school cafeteria. Posterboard triptychs filled with photos, graphs, and project synopses competed for the attention of wandering judges and faculty. Smith and Muller-Juez set up their demonstration just outside, where visitors could try their handmade key card on an actual locker and marvel at the array of components duct-taped to the inside of the door.
Judging panels—drawn from both Bromfield faculty and a dozen community organizations—evaluated projects from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m., after which students and parents were invited to tour the displays before the awards ceremony moved to Cronin Auditorium.
Students from grades 8 through 12 competed in three categories: experimental science, engineering, and research. In every category judges weighed not just the work itself but how well students could explain it, defend it, and describe what they would do differently.
The range of topics students chose to investigate was broad. Traditional disciplines—biology, chemistry, and physics—were all well represented, alongside engineering, computer science, and environmental science. AI appeared as both subject and tool in several projects. Environmental science found its way into projects examining water quality, road salt, plastics, and fossil fuel, topics that caught the attention of the several environmental organizations participating in the judging. Upper-grade students often chose subjects with personal or social stakes. Here’s a sampling.
Seniors Hanna Wicks (left) and Lainey Irwin present their winning project on bioplastics, awarded the high school blue rosette. Wicks and Irwin created a sustainable alternative to plastic out of natural, biodegradable materials, experimenting with the amounts of corn starch and glycerin used in the recipe in an attempt to develop a durable yet water-soluble bioplastic.
Ibrahim Shabra, a 10th-grader, wanted to know which of several homemade rocket fuels burned fastest. Working without a mentor—his parents are engineers, but their main contribution, he said, was keeping the project safe—he built a combustion chamber, set it on a digital scale, and recorded the rate at which each fuel lost mass as it burned within the chamber. The faster mass dropped, Shabra conjectured, the more energy the fuel released. His sucrose-based mixture outperformed the alternatives, while a wax compound failed to ignite entirely. The experiments set off fire alarms at home, Shabra said, prompting his parents’ oversight.
Shabra is considering a career in chemistry or engineering. His project won second place in grade 9/10 experimental chemistry and received a PTO community award.
Tenth graders Donovan Smith (left) and Roman Muller-Juez pose in front of a locker outfitted with the electronic key card system that they engineered.
Sophomore Audrey Burek knew that salt water conducts electricity better than fresh water, and she built her project around that fact. Sampling sites along Bowers Brook, she measured conductivity to map salinity levels across the watershed, finding the highest concentrations near Bare Hill Pond and around major roads treated with winter salt.
The environmental stakes are real: Excess road salt suppresses zooplankton, the small organisms just above algae at the base of the aquatic food chain, and their decline triggers algae blooms. Burek is not yet old enough to drive; her mother drove her to the sampling sites. Her project took first place in grade 9/10 experimental biology and chemistry and received a Bare Hill Pond Watershed Management Committee community award, presented by committee Chair Bruce Leicher.
Ibrahim Shabra explains his project on rocket fuels. (Photo by George Lewinnek)
Joe Lattouf, a ninth-grader, says he has been following the stock market since he was 10 years old. For his science fair project, he asked an AI system to combine historical market performance with current news to guide investment decisions—a strategy that should, he theorized, outperform either input alone. It didn’t, not reliably. Too many unanticipated events disrupted the model’s predictions. He worked without a mentor and discovered partway through that the project required a nine-page research paper. He hadn’t known that going in. He finished it anyway. His project took first place in grade 9/10 educational displays, physical and computer sciences, and received a School Committee community award.
Misha Kalava, an 11th-grader, brought an experimental lens to a question most students her age navigate daily. Her project measured the effect of social media content on athletic performance, dividing participants into three groups exposed to positive, neutral, or negative content, then testing each on reaction time, throwing accuracy, and sprint speed before and after exposure. Athletes who watched positive, motivational content, for example, improved their reaction time by more than 11% compared to their exposure to neutral content. Those exposed to negative content—sports injuries, failures—were nearly 74% slower.
Kalava grounded her findings in the Yerkes-Dodson law, which holds that moderate arousal produces optimal performance, and applied it separately to each task. Accuracy in throwing depends on the ability to focus rather than muscles and therefore responds differently to stimulation. She also noted, without prompting, what she’d do differently: a true no-media control group, to separate entirely the effect of any social media content—including neutral content—on performance. Her project took first place in grade 11 experimental biology and received a Lions Club community award.
Harrison Binnick, Evan Burek, and Owen Balsis built a motorized model Jeep, mounted it on an inclined plane surfaced with pavement, gravel, sand, dirt, and snow, and then tested four tire types—highway, all-season, mud, and mud with chains—to see which held best under each condition. Highway tires won on pavement. Mud tires won on loose surfaces. Nothing worked well on snow.
The project had a backstory: Balsis grew up in Texas, visited Colorado with his family one winter, and encountered tire chains for the first time. That memory became a science fair project. Binnick is interested in mechanical engineering; Burek leans toward chemical engineering; Balsis is considering medical school. The project took second place in grade 11/12 engineering and received a PTO community award.
There was no shortage of awards for this year’s young scientists: 33 presented by representatives of a dozen community organizations, and 36 from the Bromfield science faculty, presented by science and technology department lead and chemistry teacher Kristen Vanderveen and physics and engineering teacher Julie Burton. A complete list of awards is posted on the Harvard Press website.
The fair’s top honors—two blue rosettes—went to the best middle and high school experimental or engineering projects.
The middle school rosette went to eighth-graders Agastya Nambiar and Vidhur Sampige, who cultured E. coli on agar plates and successfully introduced a gene for fluorescence via plasmid into the organism’s DNA—and without access to a proper laboratory incubator. Their results diverged in interesting ways from published research, almost certainly, they conjectured, because of temperature variables a real lab would have controlled for.
The high school rosette went to 12th-graders Hanna Wicks and Lainey Irwin for their research into converting plant material into sustainable plastic alternatives—a project that also earned an award from the Harvard Climate Initiative Committee.
Rich Cummings, representing the Harvard Conservation Trust and a scientist himself for more than 40 years, offered the students in the room a short field guide to the scientific temperament. The best scientists, he said, tend to be intellectually curious, a little stubborn, willing to fail and try again—and drawn to the idea of learning something nobody else has ever known before. “If you find yourself with these traits,” he told them, “give it serious thought. Society always needs good scientists.”
2026 Science Fair Community Awards
Bare Hill Pond Watershed Management
- Audrey Burek, How Does Proximity of Roadways Affect the Salinity in Harvard’s Waterways?
- Elise Knowles, Effects of PH and GH on Algae Growth
Harvard Climate Initiative Committee
- Hanna Wicks and Lainey Irwin, From Sprouts to Sustainable, Plastics New Growth
Harvard Conservation Commission
- Flora Poutasse and Erika Douglas, How Manipulating Variables Affect the Growth and Development of Plants
- Bee Overmiller and Pluto Bowen, The Problem with Honey Bees
- Christina Kekis and Caroline Yang, Heat Absorption and Dissipation of Urban Surface Materials
Harvard Conservation Trust
- Lauren Gill, The Ecological Impact of Fast Fashion
Harvard Energy Advisory Committee
- Tony Xu, Parth Dwivedi, Mohin Nambiar, Water Wheel Generator Blade Design and Their Effect on Electrical Output
Harvard PTO
- Vishanth Bachu and Johan Joel, Which Bridge Is Strongest
- Sarina Linde, Can AI Predict the Unpredictable in Sound Design Structures?
- Ibrahim Shabra, DIY Rocket Fuel
- Harrison Binnick, Evan Burek, Owen Balsis, Tires v. Traction
- Liam Glew and Conor Glew, Laser Lab
Thompson Award
- Donovan Smith and Roman Muller-Juez, Locker Key Card System
Harvard Schools Trust
- Caroline Balsis and Kate Wicks, Light v. Vitamin C: How Storage Conditions Affect Nutrient Stability
- Alex Senykoff and Aiden Chang, Creating a PH Sensitive Paint Using Natural Indicators
- Reety Sharma, An Experiment to Study the Effect of Salt Concentration on Performance of a Sodium-Based Electrochemical Cell
- Grace McWaters and Avery Lohin, Turnip the Beet: How Music Affects Vegetable Growth
Lions Club
- Ava McEwen, Brains, How they work!
- Misha Kalava, Effects of Social Media on Physical Performance, Reaction Time, and Accuracy
- Vivienne Cogan, The Brain Game: Impact of Gender in Concussion Recovery
- Luise Tatarev, The Mind’s Night Shift: Exploring the Intricacies of Sleep and Dreams
- Natalie Guilmette, Invisible Architecture: How X-Rays Uncover Atomic Structure
Nashoba Valley Amateur Radio Club
- Logan Charland, Experimental Determination of Stall Characteristics in 3D Printed Airfoils
- Cooper Baron, Signals from the Sky: Picking Up and Decoding Satellite Signals
- Gwyneth Poutasse and Sophia Pierce, The Super Ultrasonic Levitator
- Jacob Dangel and Anir AitDowd, The Wi-Fi Dead Zone Map
Nashua River Watershed Association
- Josh Pelak and Rowan Morine, Filtration Design
- Ruby Hunt and Summer Finn, Fiber Fallout: The Wash Cycle Pollution Problem
School Committee
- Caroline Calozzo and Libby Raines, Studdy: The Perfect Website to Find you a Study Buddy
- Joe Lattouf, Can AI Beat the S&P 500
- Russell Aloysius, Creating and Teaching AI to Play a Game
Select Board
- Clara Ames and Ashley Aftosmis, Reliability of Food Preservatives
2026 Science Fair Faculty Winners
High School Blue Rosette
- Hanna Wicks and Lainey Irwin, From Sprouts to Sustainable, Plastics New Growth
Middle School Blue Rosette
- Agastya Nambiar and Vidhur Sampige, Genetically Engineer Bacteria to Exhibit Fluorescence
Grade 11/12 Engineering (Water Quality)
- 1st: Evan Gill and Gregory Urqhart, Project Puddle to Pure
- 2nd: Bowen Clarke and Emma Nguyen, From Brine to Shine: Compact Solar Desalination Device
Grade 11/12 Engineering
- 1st: Eleanor Daly and Tess Dirstine, Temperature and Noise, Inside Our Walls
- 2nd: Harrison Binnick, Evan Burek, Owen Balsis, Tires vs. Traction
Grade 12 Experimental Physics/Environmental Science
- 1st: Christian Johannesen, Ion Jet
- 2nd: Liam Glew and Conor Glew, Laser Lab
Grade 11/12 Experimental Chemistry
- 1st: Elise Knowles, Effects of pH and GH on Algae Growth
- 2nd: Alex Senykoff and Aidan Chang, Creating a pH Sensitive Paint Using Natural Indicators
Grade 11 Experimental Biology
- 1st: Misha Kalava, Effects of Social Media on Physical Performance, Reaction Time, and Accuracy
- 2nd: Jacqueline Wilkins, Bleeding Beets: Using Plant Models to Visualize the Impact of Alcohol on Cell Permeability
Grade 10-12 Engineering (Computer Science)
- 1st: Russell Aloysius McFarland, Creating and Teaching an AI to Play a Game
- 2nd: Sarina Linde, Can AI Predict the Unpredictable in Sound Design Structures?
Grade 10-12 Experimental Chemistry
- 1st: Hanna Wicks and Lainey Irwin, From Sprouts to Sustainable, Plastics New Growth
- 2nd: Clara Ames and Ashley Aftosmis, Reliability of Food Preservatives
Grade 10-12 Educational Display, Biology
- 1st: Piper Candon and Katie Boutelle, Burning Energy: How Exercise Affects Glucose Spikes After Consuming Sugar
- 2nd: Ellie Pulido, More Than Medicine (How Art and Music Help People with Dementia)
Art in Science
- 1st: Abby Wool, How the Golden Ratio Is Perceived as Perfection
Grade 9/10 Engineering
- 1st: Roman Muller-Juez and Donovan Smith, Locker Key Card System
- 2nd: Alex Soor, Foam Factor
Grade 9/10 Experimental Chemistry
- 1st: Alden Battaglia, Impact of Environmental Conditions on Bread Baking
- 2nd: Ibrahim Shabra, DIY Rocket Fuel
Grade 9/10 Experimental Biology & Chemistry
- 1st: Audrey Burek, How Does Proximity of Roadways Affect the Salinity in Harvard’s Waterways?
- 2nd: Reety Sharma, An Experiment to Study the Effect of Salt Concentration on the Performance of a Sodium-Based Electrochemical Cell
Grade 9/10 Educational Displays, Physical and Computer Sciences
- 1st: Joe Lattouf, Can AI Beat the S&P 500?
- 2nd: Ace Feng Zeng, Future with Nuclear Fusion
Grade 9/10 Educational Display, Biology/Environmental Sciences
- 1st: Luise Tatarev, The Mind’s Night Shift: Exploring the Intricacies of Sleep and Dreams
- 2nd: Vivienne Cogan, The Brain Game: Impact of Gender in Concussion Recovery
Grade 8 Engineering
- 1st: Logan Charland, Remote Controlled Miniature Aircraft
Grade 8 Experimental
- 1st: Agastya Nambiar and Vidhur Sampige, Genetically Engineer Bacteria to Exhibit Fluorescence
- 2nd: Aminah Shabra, Do Your Glasses Make You Old? Or Are You Just Old?
Grade 8 Educational Display
- 1st: Pradyumna Guruprasad and Naraen Thanigaivel, The Inner Workings and History of the Modern Microwave
- 2nd: Vishanth Bachu and Johan Joel, Which Bridge Is Strongest?