Valley Stream South senior will present her medical research in California

Although she hasn’t even graduated high school yet, a South senior is making her mark in the medical research field. Julia Poje will present her work at a national science fair in May.

Poje has been working for the past two summers in a science laboratory at Columbia University. Last year, she spent her time trying to find a detector for filovirus, a family of viruses which includes Ebola and Marburg.

Filovirus is rare, Poje said, but deadly. It will attack the lining of blood vessels. She said she learned about it through a medical show on television and thought it would be an interesting study. In her research, Poje has been working with deoxyribzymes to find a way to detect the disease in humans.

In February, Poje presented her findings at the Long Island Science Fair. Judges came from Stony Brook University, Brookhaven National Labs, Cold Spring Harbor Labs and North Shore-LIJ. Her project, “A Molecular Automation with Built-in Visual Display for Filovirus Identification,” impressed the judges.

Poje said she knew early on that she had done well — one judge told her she received a perfect score and another recommended her for a summer job at Brookhaven. There were about 400 participants in the fair and the top 30 percent in each category moved on to the second round. Poje was among them, presented her project again in March and won.

She will now present her research at the Intel Fair in San Jose, Calif., May 8-15. Poje said there will be judges from national science and medical institutes. There will also be a day when the public can come in, check out the exhibits and ask questions. She is looking forward to that. “I like talking about my project,” Poje said. “I think it’s really cool.”

Poje said she has been interested in science she was a child. She remembers watching “Nature” and “Nova” on PBS, which sparked her interest in the sciences. In high school, she has taken Advanced Placement courses, but said it is tough to do the type of in-depth study she has been able to do at Columbia University.