The Florida Junior Academy of Science (FJAS) Speaker and Poster competition provides young scientists across the state with the opportunity to present their research to a panel of experienced judges and like-minded peers. The most recent iteration of this competition took place virtually March 12, organized by Heritage’s very own Mrs. Leya Joykutty.
In order to qualify for the competition, students had to go through a vetting process where their abstract and paper were reviewed by a committee. Eligible students were invited to present their research either as a speaker or using a poster in the most relevant category, whether that be environmental, physical, behavioral, literary or biological sciences. All research students at Heritage were obliged to submit their abstracts and paper for initial judging and many were accepted for presentation.
During the competition, speakers spoke virtually to the judges and other students via Zoom with the aid of PowerPoint slides. Poster presentations were prepared beforehand, but presenters were available for live chat questions with judges or students.
“Preparing the project competition virtually required us to collect all student documents ahead of time in order to prepare the website. Links had to be made and posted in advance and meeting links had to be synchronized to allow for the effective deployment of concurrent sessions. Creativity had to come into place to determine how to make poster sessions interactive so that students and judges could be able to talk to each other,” Mrs. Joykutty said.
During the awards ceremony, students saw their hard work pay off as Heritage sweeped the categories. Here are the winners:
Environmental Poster:
First Place – Emir Sahin, sophomore
Medical Poster:
Honorable Mention – Malcolm Owusu, sophomore
Fourth Place – Likhitha Selvan, freshman
Third Place – Shrika Kantipudi, sophomore
First Place – Amarachukwu Okpala, sophomore
Biological Poster:
Honorable Mention – Calvin Matthew, freshman
Third Place – Prateek Gupta, senior
Medical Poster
Second Place – Alejandra Abramson, junior
Medical Speaker:
Third Place – Maya Neeranjun, junior
First Place – Jacob Federici, sophomore
Environmental Speaker:
Third Place – Melodi Fugate, sophomore
Behavioral Speaker:
Honorable Mention – Emilin Matthew, senior
Second Place – Ellaheh Gohari, sophomore
First Place – Larissa Ma, senior
Middle School:
Second Place – Anagha Iyer, eighth
Winners will be nominated to the American Junior Academy of Science conference where they can present their research on a national scale.
