Cyrus Ng [13F] and Dorottya Papp [13N], assisted by teacher-supervisor Mr. Cawson, competed in the Tsinghua S.T. Yau High School Award Finale in Beijing, China, representing Hong Kong in the Chemistry category from December 6 to December 8. They won the Bronze Award (with a 10,000 RMB cash prize) out of over 600 teams that participated in their subject.
This was part of their seven-month long journey developing a research paper on repurposing existing drugs to treat HPV cancers. In November, they achieved 1st place in the Asia Pacific Round against countries such as Japan, Singapore, Thailand and Korea. In total, they had to pass 4 rounds of assessment and public review, including two 30-minute oral defenses from Professors of Caltech, Tsinghua, University of Tokyo, HKU and many more.
As Cyrus and Dorottya said, “It was one of the toughest things we’ve done because we had to tackle research that had never been explored before, meaning we had to develop our own methodology. For example, we adapted university-level molecular docking software to our home computers by writing our own Python code, and even combined different ideas from machine learning papers into a novel method of statistical analysis.”
You can read their full research paper here.