Norwalk Student Headed to Broadcom MASTERS Competition

A Norwalk schoolgirl has been selected as one of 30 national finalists for the 2012 Broadcom Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Rising Stars (MASTERS) Competition.

Katherine Fennell was selected from thousands of entrants to head to the Washington, D.C., competition beginning on September 28, 2012. Fennell has the potential to win the $25,000 Samueli Foundation Award.

In the 2011-2012 school year, Fennell was a seventh-grader attending Norwalk's Montessori Middle School when she prepared a project called Could a Small Aquatic Plant Have Reversed Global Warming 49 Million Years Ago? In her research, she found it plausible that a small fresh-water fern called an Azollo could have caused a significant decline in carbon dioxide 55 million years ago.

Fennell is one of seven Connecticut natives attending the competition.

• Maura Oei, home schooled in Hebron, developed a prototype Pendulum Wave Energy Conversion Device that produced clean, reliable, scalable , low-cost renewable energy. The project was titled Development of a Prototype Pendulum Wave Energy Conversion Device.
• Jonathan Paul Siveyer, Thurgood Marshall Middle School in Bridgeport, Peel Power:Using Banana Peels to Reduce Metal Contamination of Water.
• Martha Haddad, St. Joseph School in Danbury, Designing an Effective Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell.
• Elizabeth Patricia Lopreiato, St. Paul School in Kensington, The Eco-Friendly Diaper, Landfill Design: The Type of Cloth versus the Rate of Decomposition
• Paul James Hansel, Eastern Middle School in Riverside, An Investigation into Hydrogen-Producing Green Algae.
• Kevin Joseph Moya, Middlebrook School in Wilton, Improving Efficiency of Solar Energy: The Effect of Magnification, Tilt-Angle and Temperature on the Power Output of a Silicon Solar Cell.

Participating students are nominated by the Broadcom MASTERS Competition by the Society for Science & the Public (SSP)-affiliated science fairs held throughout the school year. Fennell placed first in the seventh-grade Pfizer Life Sciences category.