Four Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts seniors earned recognition at the 2026 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in May.
The team of Nathan Grady of Blytheville, Emily Lin of Little Rock and Kaitleen Toh of Little Rock received a Fourth Grand Award in the Translational Medical Science category at the competition that was held May 9-15 in Phoenix, Ariz. They earned their trip to ISEF by placing second overall at the West Central Regional Science Fair at ASMSA in February.
Nathan Harbut of Hot Springs earned honorable mention recognition in a special awards category sponsored by the American Mathematical Society. Harbut qualified for ISEF at the Arkansas State Science and Engineering Fair in April.
ISEF is the world’s largest pre-college STEM competition and is sponsored by the Society for Science. Ninth- through 12th-grade students from around the world are competed for awards, prizes and scholarships.
Grady, Lin and Toh gained the nickname The Alzheimer’s Trio (The Trio for short) for their research on Alzheimer’s disease, a serious neurodegenerative disorder that alters memory, thinking and behavior. Their project, “Discovering a Path from Molecular Modeling to Alzheimer’s Phytotherapeutics: Characterizing Novel GSK3β Inhibitors in silico and in vitro,” explored five potential inhibitors to GSK3β, an enzyme associated with several hallmarks of the disease, eventually testing two of them.
Two GSK3β inhibitors have made it to clinical trials but have severe side effects, Toh said. That led the team to consider chemicals derived from medicinal herbs because of their long history of being nontoxic, multitarget treatments for diseases with little to no side effects. Through the testing, the team determined that as the concentration of the two test inhibitors — Chlorogenic acid and Thymoquinone — increased that the percentage of enzyme activity decreased, meaning the inhibitors worked. They tested the inhibitors using Luminescence Kinase Assays and ADP-Glo Assays in a lab.
The team had low of expectations of earning recognition at ISEF, Toh said. Translational Medical Science was the second-largest category at the competition, featuring 94 projects.
“Looking around at all of our competitors and neighboring booths, we saw hundreds of amazing projects, most of which probably had better connections and funding than ours,” she said.
They received mixed feelings from the judges, including 10 category judges and two special awards judges. Some seemed very interested while others did not seem to be. One judge never asked a question about their project and proceeded to tell them their research had been “scooped” in a paper published about one of the chemicals the day before.
From the moment they formed their team at the beginning of their junior year while enrolled in the Life Science Capstone, the Trio was told by many people that it would be unlikely for them to place in the school’s science fair “and impossible for us to go to ISEF, simply because we were a group of three and judges preferred individuals” and to compete with other projects, Toh said.
“We worked harder than anyone though and practiced for hours on our presentation to judges, having to decide who says what and who answers what questions, which can be hard for three people to divide,” Toh said.
They sought additional funding for their research, including writing and requesting grants from various organizations with the help of one of their advisers, Dr. Patryjca Krakowiak, ASMSA’s Science Department chair. They received funding from the ASMSA Foundation Fund to help fund their research. They also made a connection at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock to get time in a lab with necessary equipment they didn’t have access to at ASMSA.
“From this, we hope that future students won’t be scared to form groups with people with similar interests. We hope that students aiming to be an ISEF finalist know that it’s not about who has the best resources and connections but who can achieve the most and push for the best that you can be,” Toh said.
Harbut’s project, “Integration to Segregation: Analyzing Clustering Coefficients in the Brain Across Arithmetic Performance,” studied how connections between particular parts of the brain may hinder arithmetic performance.
“If you think of the brain like a very, very complicated matrix representing connections between several regions in the brain, you can treat the brain like a set of nodes and edges and study them with tools from graph theory,” he said.
He used clustering coefficients to ask simple questions of each node. The answers allowed him to identify how various parts of the brain were connecting with their neighbors and influencing task performance.
Harbut said having the opportunity to attend ISEF was an incredible honor, “so you can probably imagine my surprise to have received anything! I’m excited to see what doors the American Mathematical Society opens for me as I go on to college.”
He said he found the opportunities to meet and visit with his fellow ISEF competitors to be the most enjoyable aspect of the weeklong competition, especially the pin exchange the competition hosts for participants.
“The motive to approach anyone was to, of course, collect their pin, but I often found myself caught up in conversations about anything from what kind of plane they flew here on to their favorite hobbies back home. Lots of moments like these grew into lots of international friendships,” he said.
Harbut thanked ASMSA math faculty members Caleb Grisham and Dr. Eiko Koizumi for their support while working on his project.
“Whether Mr. Grisham’s napkin sketch-paced talks about Fourier Analysis or Dr. Koizumi’s endless support every time I shifted my project’s focus, several ASMSA faculty contributed to my intuition and motivation, making my attendance possible. Thank you all!” he said.