Long Island Student Wins 3rd Place, $150K In Regeneron Contest

STONY BROOK, NY — A high school senior from Stony Brook won a major prize this week, when Amber Luo, a Ward Melville High School senior, won third place in the 2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search.

Luo, 18, will receive $150,000 for her research into how computational biology software can help identify sites on mRNA that could be useful for understanding how diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer function.

The contest is the largest and most prestigious effort to identify promising American high schoolers in STEM. In 2020 and 2021, the contest was held virtually, but this year Luo and her fellow 40 finalists, gathered in Washington, D.C. for the awards ceremony.

Brentwood's Roberto Lopez was also a finalist, along with Roslyn's Hailee Han Byur Youn, who was named the Seaborg Award winner, given to the student who most exemplifies their class and the extraordinary attributes of nuclear chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1951.

Alumni of the talent search have gone on to win 13 Nobel Prizes, 11 National Medals of Science, six Breakthrough Prizes, 22 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships and two Fields Medals, and found companies like Regeneron, according to the contest's news release.