BROOKINGS – Two Brookings High schoolers will attend the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) for the second time in their high school careers.

Juniors Aditya Tummala and William Hummel will attend the international fair online beginning May 17. To gain entrance into the fair, they first had to compete and win their respective categories of research in the Eastern South Dakota Science and Engineering Fair, held this past March.

“Basically, both Aditya and I have been doing this since the sixth grade, and so we’ve been doing for a few years now and the goal has been to get to ISEF. So we’ve always come up with different ideas every year and sometimes adding onto different ideas that we’ve worked on before so that we could get to this point. The fair was always based on innovations we worked on to either improve our community or our society as a whole, and so I think that it’s a super great opportunity to get into ISEF this year,” Hummel said.

“It’s an amazing opportunity. It’s a culmination of the entire competition of all official science fairs itself. So you have 80 different countries, more than 1,000 different projects eliminated down to the best of the best. Through this we all gather together and collaborate; really, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s like one really big science fair for the entire world,” Tummala said.

The Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair has been around since 1921 and has had tens of thousands of participants. Sponsors include National Geographic and Microsoft. 

“Over the past few years we’ve worked on various projects with the goal of ISEF because it’s so prestigious. We built toward this, and the projects that we’ve done over this past year is what we’re presenting at ISEF,” Tummala said.

Hummel’s project focused on locating E.coli bacteria on produce, whereas Tummala’s project focused on addiction rehabilitation methods.

“So we all know that there’s been a lot of E.coli outbreaks recently that have put a lot of people in the hospital and made a lot of people sick. So what I wanted to do in my project was to treat the E.coli on the surface of this produce. … I used a virus and an enzyme to target biofilms on the surface of the produce because the FDA found out that the main culprit for these E.coli outbreaks are biofilms, which are basically bunches of cells of E.coli coming together to form a community which can defend against a bunch of different things – including the current sanitation method that’s used on produce right now,” Hummel explained.

“I used a phage, which is a special type of virus that specifically targets E.coli cells only, and also an enzyme called cellulase to degrade the biofilm on the surface of produce so that it would be safer for people to consume,” he added.

He said that he was compelled to do this research because of how much of a gap there is in being able to better detect E.coli. Hummel wanted to change that.

Tummala said he wanted to figure out why so many people either don’t seek or drop out of addiction treatment centers.

“So my project was a study on addiction treatment centers in the Midwest. One major problem that we’re having right now as a country … is that right now, with the United States, more than 20 million people needed substance abuse disorder treatment – addiction treatment. But, only around 10% of people received that treatment; and of that 10%, 70-80% dropped out of treatment almost immediately,” Tummala said.

“If we can answer that question, that would make a huge impact,” Tummala said. “What I did was have a broad survey of these clients undergoing addiction treatment process, as well as the counselors who run these types of programs, and ask them the reasons for these issues and what can be done to have better success rates for these treatment programs.”

Both students worked on these projects over the past academic year. But, as with everything else in their academic careers, their research methods and even the fair itself were all affected by COVID-19.

“Usually with these fairs, we do them in person and we have poster boards set up with all of our data. But unfortunately, with COVID, we couldn’t do that, so this year it’s all online,” Hummel said.

Hummel said SDSU professors joined in online and asked the students about their respective projects to critique them and determine the winners in each category. He said he and Aditya were two of the four projects selected at the ESD fair to go to ISEF.

This is their second time going to ISEF. Both students went to ISEF their freshman year.

“With COVID, a lot of things that we normally would have done or these procedures, they’ve completely changed. The entire science fair world has really been turned upside down. … We faced a lot of challenges because we had a lot of hands-on work that’s really in the field research and science,” Tummala said. “But I feel that it was very rewarding in the end.”

“For me, mine was a survey of rehab and treatment centers. What I did was that over the past two years I’ve volunteered at addiction treatment centers and clinics – so the Carol Institute in Sioux Falls and the Sanford Treatment Center – I got to build these personal relationships with the clients, the counselors, with the physicians … and a lot of that connection I wasn’t able to build on since I wasn’t able to volunteer this past year. So using those previous relationships, I was able to reach out to the professionals that I knew and conduct the surveys online,” Tummala added.

Hummel was doing some of his research at SDSU. 

“I was in the works of setting up a whole new trial for my project. Unfortunately, COVID got so bad that the university closed. So I had to basically make my peace with not being able to set up treatments that I would have been able to add to my project. So, I really had to work around that,” Hummel added.

Tummala and Hummel would like to see their current research grow into more projects and eventually get published, but they both agreed that goal might have to wait until college.

Both students have received several hundred dollars in accumulated scholarships from various science-based organizations such as Sanford, SDSU, and Daktronics.

Contact Matthew Rhodes at mrhodes@brookingsregister.com.