Knoxville News Sentinel 11/30
Students in the Oak Ridge High School thesis program, an advanced research class, have been consumed with research for almost six months, and now their hard work has begun to pay off. Five seniors - a team of three, Yajit Jain, Carlos del-Castillo-Negrete and Scotty Chung, and a team of two, Yiwei Li and Mattie Lloyd - were named regional finalists in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, while three other seniors were regional semifinalists - Sam Worley, Sam Snodgrass and Patrick Tae. The Siemens Competition is administered by College Board and funded by the Siemens Foundation to provide college scholarships to high school students who succeed in the math, science or technology. "We worked on the SNS (Spallation Neutron Source) accelerator," Chung said, where his team developed an automated method to minimize beam loss. "The ultimate goal would be to have an application for people in the control room to use," del-Castillo-Negrete said. The other team did something different. "We worked on fabricating new materials for magnetic cooling," Li said. Lloyd continued, "It's more efficient and an environmentally friendly alternative to vapor compression."
