Five Kennedy students earn Intel badges

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When not researching genetics, Barsky designs web pages, including one for Kennedy’s literary magazine, Magnum Opus. He is also a senator in student government and a member of the cross-country, spring and winter track teams.

He said he hopes to attend Tufts, Northeastern, NYU, Brandeis or Carnegie Mellon in the fall and study computer science.

Natalie Giovino, 17,

Of Merrick

Giovino studied drug resistance in melanoma treatments for her Intel project. Much as bacteria can build up resistance to antibiotics when they are overprescribed, cancers can develop resistance to chemotherapy drugs.

Giovino looked at two melanoma drugs –– AZD6244 and MK2206 –– to identify treatments that would bypass cancer’s resistance to chemotherapy. In Petri dishes, she created a line of melanoma cells that were resistant to treatment. Then she began looking at a variety of drug combinations that would override the resistance.

Giovino conducted her research at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Giovino is vice president of Kennedy’s science club and a competitor on the Science Olympiad team, as well as co-president of Tutors for a Cure, which raises money for cancer research by offering tutoring services. She is also a member of Model Congress, One World, which connects mainstream and special-education students, yearbook and art club.

Giovino plans to attend Cornell University in the fall. She was inspired to join Kennedy’s Authentic Science Research Program –– and to apply to Cornell –– by her older sister, Marissa, who went through ASR, graduated from Cornell and is now a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, studying chemistry.

William Goedel, 17,

Of Bellmore

Goedel’s Intel project took him on a journey in time that went back roughly 1,000 years. At Hofstra University’s Anthropology Department, he studied 68 ancient glass shards found at an archaeological dig site in what is now southeast Turkmenistan, on the border with Afghanistan.

Goedel looked at mass spectrometer readings of the fragments. A mass spectrometer analyzes the elemental structure of a substance.

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