Biology teacher and ExploraVision coach David Stone looks over the team's project. Gargoyle photo by Danny Ge (click to enlarge)

URBANA — Senior Isaac Chambers and juniors Tej Chajed, Daniel Cheng, and Danny Ge have won an ExploraVision regional championship for their proposal to use synthesized proteins in the fight against heart disease, biology teacher David Stone announced today.

The students will now advance to the final round, where they will compete against five other regional champions from across the U.S.

As regional champions they have won a Toshiba notebook computer for the school, and a gift for themselves and their supervising teacher, Stone.

They competed in a region that consisted of nine states (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Ohio, Wisconsin) and all of Canada.

If the team wins the final round, each member would receive a U.S. Savings Bond worth $10,000 at maturity. National winners will be announced in early May.

ExploraVision is a contest open to K-12 students living in the United States, U.S. territories, or Canada. The competition asks participants to create and explore a future technology by developing new ways to apply current science.

The Uni team's winning project is called HEARTt: sHDL Enabled Atheroma Reverse Transport
Technology. Here is a summary from their project description:

Atherosclerosis is a disease that causes excess formation of plaque on the artery walls that builds up and eventually ruptures the walls to cause heart attacks or strokes. Many people suffer from this incurable disease, and few successful treatments are available. HEARTt is designed to treat atherosclerosis by using synthesized proteins to remove the plaque.

"I think going into this year's competition, Tej, Daniel, and I were fairly certain that we wanted to address a health issue with our technology," Ge said. "We thought that treating a disease provided us with a clear sense of the problem we were trying to solve and allowed for a systemic approach to
treat the disease. This was building from our work last year, where we made a treatment for cancer using carbon nanotube bundles to heat and destroy tumors.

"This year, however, I felt like we did a lot more work as far as researching the exact nature of the disease we were curing. Some of the information we found went against common belief and intuition, which I think shows the depth of our research. I think this level of research, more than anything, contributed to our impressive final project."

According to Stone, the team members must now "develop a Web site, incorporate video that introduces their technology, discuss background behind incorporated technologies, discuss the working of this project on a molecular level, and present the impacts (both positive and negative) of their proposed technology on society."

The competition, now in its 17th year, is sponsored by Toshiba and administered by the National Science Teachers Association.

Every year, ExploraVision attracts more than 10,000 K-12 students, with about 12 to 20 Uni students participating. This year seven Uni groups took part, with four groups, totaling 12 students, completing their projects. In all, according to Stone, the program received 4,388 team entries representing the participation of 13,774 students from across the U.S. and Canada.

"The goal of the competition is for teams of two to four students to use their imaginations, along with their research, writing and artistic skills to create a vision of a technology of the future," Stone said in his e-mail announcing the winners. "Each team selects a current technology and predicts the state and uses of that technology 20 years into the future, or develops an entirely new technology to address current and anticipated problems within that same time period."

Stone has coached ExploraVision teams since the mid-1990s. During that time Uni has put together one of the best records of any high school in the contest, with teams placing first in 1996 and 1997 and second in 1998; team members have received $80,000 in scholarships.

"I think our chances going into the final round are good," said Chambers. "We have a very solid project technically, and much of the second round is translating the technical project into a more tangible form through the Web site, video, prototype, etc."

On May 4, first-place and second-place overall winners will be announced in each of the four grade levels (10-12, 7-9, 4-6, K-3). First-place team members will each receive a U.S. EE Savings Bond worth $10,000, while second-place winners will receive a savings bond worth $5,000.

"HEARTt was the third project for Tej, Daniel, and me and the second for Isaac," said Ge. "I felt more confident turning in this project than any of our previous ones simply because of the amount of work we put into it compared to previous projects. This year, we worked up until the last minute before turning it in, whereas in previous years we had finished our project up to a week in advance.

"We also felt that the late addition of Isaac to our group benefited us as he designed the Web graphics portion of our submission, which allowed the rest of us to focus more on the paper and add some last minute touches. Isaac's Web magic will surely come in handy as we compete in the next round."

Uni ExploraVision Projects at a glance

HEARTt: sHDL Enabled Atheroma Reverse Transport Technology

Group members: Senior Isaac Chambers and juniors Tej Chajed, Daniel Cheng, and Danny Ge

Grade level: 10-12

Project details: Atherosclerosis is a disease that causes excess formation of plaque on the artery walls that builds up and eventually ruptures the walls to cause heart attacks or strokes. Many people suffer from this incurable disease, and few successful treatments are available. HEARTt is designed to treat atherosclerosis by using synthesized proteins to remove the plaque.

NeCoRe Heart: Neuron-Controlled Replacement Heart

Group members: Sophomores Eric Chen, Zack Korol-Gold, and former Uni student Youyang Gu, a sophomore at Henry M. Gunn High School in California

Grade level: 10-12

Project details: Aiming their project at giving heart transplant patients a better life, these sophomores decided to create a completely new artificial replacement heart. Their new replacement heart improves on previous artificial hearts by allowing the continuous flow of energy and does not require patients to take any medication or wear an external battery.

BMRIDD: Bone MRI and Density Device

Group members: Freshmen Kathy Qiu and Aishwarya Gautam

Grade level: 7-9

Project details: This group developed a technology that applies magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques to the dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) scan. According to Qiu, "The purpose is to measure bone mineral density while also evaluating overall bone quality, which neither the DXA nor MRI can do alone." Qiu found the project to be enlightening: "I've learned a lot about how some technologies — DXA and MRI in particular — are used for health evaluation; I've gotten a better understanding of the scientific process; [and] I've become a better writer."

C-SMART: Toothbrush for Earlier Dental Caries Detection (C-SMART stands for Caries-Sensing Monitoring Alerting Reporting Toothbrush)

Group members: Freshmen Dax Earl, Rohit Palekar, and Anna Rubakhina

Grade level: 7-9

Project details: Ever wonder whether your teeth are decaying or getting a case of dental caries? These freshmen developed C-SMART, an improved version of the modern toothbrush that will be able to tell the users whether they have caries developing on their teeth. To detect the caries, C-SMART uses laser technology that collects reflected light from the caries that is sent to a microcomputer chip in the toothbrush handle.