Menlo School is pleased to announce that senior Katherine Tung has been named a finalist in the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2021, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors. Owned and produced by the Society for Science and sponsored by Regeneron, the Science Talent Search focuses on identifying, inspiring, and engaging the nation’s most promising young scientists who are creating the ideas that could solve society’s most urgent challenges.

The 2021 finalists were selected from 1,760 highly qualified entrants, all of whom completed an original research project and extensive application process. Earlier this month, the Society and Regeneron named the top 300 scholars. The finalists were selected based on their projects’ scientific rigor and their potential to become world-changing scientists and leaders.

“I’m just so amazed by Katherine,” says Than Healy. “I had a chance to sit in on her IP project presentation a month or two ago and was blown away not just by her content knowledge but by the news ways that she was putting information together. I realized partway through the presentation that what I was witnessing was the construction of new understanding—thinking that hadn’t existed in the world before—and that was a humbling moment indeed.”

Katherine derived properties for partially ordered sets for her Regeneron Science Talent Search mathematics project, titled “The Sperner Property for 132-Avoiding Intervals in the Weak Order.” Depth-first searches are used in computer science in applications for getting driving directions or search results. When depth-first searches are applied to graphs, they induce an order on the nodes which corresponds to elements of interesting combinatorial structures called 132-avoiding intervals. In her work, Katherine proved that all 132-avoiding intervals have the Sperner property, and her result is related to important conjectures in algebraic combinatorics and geometry. Katherine hopes that her work will lead to further breakthroughs in these conjectures, which will help speed up graph searches.

Katherine will participate in a virtual competition from March 10-17, 2021, where she will undergo a rigorous virtual judging process to compete for more than $1.8 million in awards. She will also have an opportunity to interact with leading scientists and display her project to the public during a virtual event on March 14. Usually held in person in Washington, D.C., the 2021 competition will take place virtually in order to keep the finalists and their families safe during the ongoing pandemic.

The finalists are each awarded at least $25,000, and the top 10 awards range from $40,000 to $250,000. The top 10 Regeneron Science Talent Search 2021 winners will be announced during a live-streamed virtual awards ceremony on March 17. In total, more than $3 million in awards will be distributed throughout the Regeneron Science Talent Search, which includes awards to finalists as well as $2,000 provided to each of the top 300 scholars and their schools.

For a list of this year’s finalists, visit https://www.societyforscience.org/regeneron-sts/2021-finalists.