San Diego – – October 12, 2026 -- Eleven students from the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair (GSDSEF) reached the 76th Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), and they brought home eight awards worth a combined $6,300. The world's largest precollege science and engineering competition concluded on May 15 with the Grand Awards ceremony in Phoenix, Arizona.
More than 1,700 finalists competed for over $7 million in prizes
The finalists came from 365 affiliated fairs in more than 60 countries, regions and territories. Two of the 11 San Diego-area finalists qualified through the California Science and Engineering Fair (CSEF). GSDSEF students took second place, third place and four fourth-place awards.
Two students earned the top local placements
Shounak Ray Chaudhuri, a Grade 12 student at Francis Parker School, won a second award of $2,400 in Engineering Technology: Statics and Dynamics. His project is titled "Novel Scalable Autonomous Vehicle Systems for Emerging Markets." He also received an INCOSE Honorable Mention.
Emma Liu, Grade 11 at The Bishop's School, won a third award of $1,200 in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Her project is a computational pipeline for high-throughput 3D quantification of cell states in polymorphonuclear neutrophils.
Four students won fourth awards of $600 each
- Kayley Xu (Grade 11, The Bishop's School), Biomedical Engineering: a passive metasurface design for visual field redirection in central vision loss.
- Claire Lim (Grade 11, Canyon Crest Academy), Cellular and Molecular Biology: an inducible TLR4 decoy targeting microglial activation to reduce neuronal degeneration in Parkinson's disease.
- Ihan Sung (Grade 11, Eastlake High School), Chemistry: renewable ammonia electrochemical synthesis by glow discharge with an iron-based catalyst. Sung also won the Aramco Excellence in Energy and Environmental Stewardship Second Award of $300.
- Ethan Hu (Grade 9, The Bishop's School), Embedded Systems: a configurable electromagnetic refreshable tactile display with an FDM-printable bistable cam.
Five more San Diego students earned finalist status
Janet Yang (Grade 11, Canyon Crest Academy) presented a multimodal approach to stroke risk assessment in Behavioral and Social Sciences. Charles Brum (Grade 9, Cathedral Catholic High School) entered BeeCast, a model to predict and help prevent bee colony collapse. Ryan Rezaei (Grade 12, Canyon Crest Academy) worked on unifying protein function prediction with protein language models (PLMs).
Giles Del Priore and Ronald Wyatt, both Grade 12 at Eastlake High School, competed in Robotics and Intelligent Machines. Their project is a behaviorally grounded, caregiver-governed AI companion for people with memory impairment.