San Ramon Student Named Regeneron Science Talent Search Finalist

SAN RAMON, CA — Dougherty Valley High School senior Elisa Zhang was selected as one of 40 finalists in the 2025 Regeneron Science Talent Search, the U.S.’s longest-running and most distinguished STEM competition for high school seniors. Zhang beat out nearly 2,500 other applicants.

The 84-year-old competition, run by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and the Society for Science, encourages students to propose ideas and solutions to urgent global challenges. Past winners have gone on to receive Nobel Prizes, MacArthur Fellowships, National Medals of Science, National Medals of Technology and Innovation, Breakthrough Prize, Fields Medal, and more.

Zhang’s project, Patching Multi-Location Software Bugs: A Multi-Agent Large Language Model Framework for Automated Program Repair, aims to propose new methods to address software defects that stem from many different parts of the codebase rather than a single line.

“The prevalence and complexity of multi-location bugs, coupled with the impressive performance of large language models on basic software engineering tasks, is why I chose my research topic,” Zhang told the San Ramon Valley Unified School District in a news release. “My specific implementation outperforms traditional and state-of-the-art baselines with reasonable time and cost.”

Zhang will now participate in a week-long competition from March 6-12, where she will undergo a rigorous judging process and compete for more than $1.8 million in awards. On March 9, she will share her results with leading scientists and the public, in person and virtually. The top 10 Regeneron Science Talent Search 2025 winners will be announced during an awards ceremony streamed live from Washington, D.C. on March 11.

Zhang was one of two students from Dougherty Valley High School who were named as the top 300 scholars in the Regeneron Science Talent Search. Timothy Zhang was also included for his project Predicting Cognitive Progression and Quantifying Clinical Factor Effects: A Temporal Dual-Model Pipeline and Cluster-Based Analysis. “The overall goal of this project was to create a utility that could predict cognitive decline and provide insights into how certain predispositions influence cognitive decline to personalize Alzheimer's prevention methods,” he told SRVUSD.

Sonya Chamberlain, Ishaan Gupta, and Sajeev Magesh, all of Dublin High School, also made the top 300.

The top scholars all received $2,000 each, and Dougherty Valley and Dublin High School received $2,000 for each winner to put toward STEM programming.

See here for the 40 finalists, and here for the top 300 scholars.