2023 Thermo Fisher JIC Top 300 and Top 30

The Top 300 Thermo Fisher JIC semi-finalists were selected from 1828 competitors and announced on September 6th. Each received a $125 award from DoD STEM. Seventeen students from the Synopsys Championship were among the Top 300 and are listed below. A complete list of the Top 300 Thermo Fisher JIC can be found at Society for Science.

Inika Adapala from Stratford Middle School, Sharanya Chudgar from Challenger School-Shawnee, Venice Parnell from The Harker School and Claire Xu from The Harker School were among the Top 30 Thermo Fisher JIC finalists. See full press release.

Congratulations to Shanya Gill, 12, from San Jose, CA for taking the $25,000 ASCEND (Aspiring Scientists Cultivating Aspiring New Discoveries) Award, for her project designing a fire detection system as well as her leadership, collaboration and critical thinking skills and to Adyant Bhavsar, 13, from San Jose, who won the $10,000 Lemelson Award for Invention, for creating a low-cost, eco-friendly version of a triboelectric nanogenerator, a device that generates electricity from the mechanical energy of two touching objects when they separate.

Teammates Claire Xu and Venice Parnell from The Harker School won a 2nd Place Engineering Award and the Team Award for their project The Future of Fashion and Functionality: Transforming Produce Waste and Lignocellulosic Fibers into Sustainable Vegan Leather.