By Tanner Nypen ’15
THE ROUNDUP

For the last 14 years during February, science classes take time to complete and share student projects.

This year there were a total of 13 different categories that students could enter their projects into for judging in the annual Science Fair

There were more than 200 students who participated in the Science Fair this year with a total of 169 projects.

The most popular category was chemistry, with 28 projects entered.

Each category had two to three winners who received ribbons.

In order to receive a ribbon students had to be chosen by judges of specific categories.

“(The projects are judged) According to scientific method,” said Mrs. Patty Mazier, director of the Science Fair. “Overall the projects were judged on how data was collected and analyzed. Was there repetition in their project? Did they use graphs? What was their conclusion?”

The winners of each category along with the students who received first place overall get the opportunity to take their projects to the Arizona Science and Engineering Fair in April.

If Brophy representatives win in the Arizona Science Fair then they get the chance to move onto an International fair that is usually held in the United States.

The overall first place winners this year were Rajet Vatsa ’14 and Aakash Jain ’14, who both tied for first place.

Vatsa’s project on Understanding the Effect of the Ketogenic Diet on the Expression of the Regulatory Protein NF-kB in Mouse Glioblastoma was entered into the Medicine and Health Science category and his project also won first in that category.

“I do research at Barrow Neurological Institute in Dr. Adrienne Scheck’s lab and basically what we are studying is neuro-oncolgy, so it’s the study of brain tumors,” Vatsa said.

The rest of the fair had other projects as well, including Alex Fankhauser ’15 and Manuel Trejo ’15 who entered their project about the effects of grey water as a water source for growing plants.

“We knew that freshwater is wasted in agriculture and grey water could have been useful but we just throw it down the drain,” Fankhauser said.