Azad Dhingra will be going to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles. It is the second straight year a student from the Springfield City School has qualified for the largest pre-college science fair competition in the United States.
Dhingra is also one of 13 Springfield High School students advancing to the state science fair at Ohio State University in May.
Students first went to their high schools’ science fair then proceeded to the county fair and the regional fair, which was held on March 19 at Central State University. Nazeer Ahmed, Hira Bashir, Humza Bashir, Sam Brougher, Hirsh Chitkara, Sarah Dixon, Mitchell Dunlap, Jacqueline Furay, Nadisha Nezhad, Simra Ranginwala, Ian Shelburne and Nadia Syed will join Dhingra at the State Science Day on May 7.
Chitkara, a freshman, studied winglets—vertical stabilizers on airplane wings--finding they can increase flight time and distance by 7 percent in addition to increasing fuel efficiency. The idea for the project came to him while he was staring at the winglets from inside a plane on his way to Germany for the high school’s German American Partnership Program, a foreign exchange program.
Furay, a senior, studied garlic’s impact on bacteria, a precursor to her studies in microbiology at OSU beginning in the fall.
Dhingra, whose mother Seema is an orthodontist, obtained real human teeth, which he coated in dental sealant, a plastic resin used to help prevent tooth decay. He then soaked the teeth in various beverages, such as Coca Cola and iced tea, then tested how the Ph balance and sugar levels impacted sealant decay. Ph balance, he found, had more impact on tooth decay than the level sugar in beverages.
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