At the summer science camp she attended last year at Stony Brook University, St. Agnes Academy Senior Jenny Yeh came up with an idea to help a friend.

"At research camp, there was a student there who broke her arm and pins had to be used to set the fracture. The bones wouldn’t fuse as they grew, so she had repeated surgeries," Jenny said.

That gave Jenny, and her research partner Mary Catherine Wen, a senior at Archbishop Molloy High School at Briarwood, New York, the idea to study the impacts magnets have on cell growth. Their work culminated in a study entitled "Proliferation and Alignment of Osteoblasts on Oriented Magnetic Nanocomposites." Jenny and Mary Catherine’s research combines a magnetic fields component with materials science to help enhance growth of bone cells and accelerate fracture and wound healing. 

"We looked at our experiments from all aspects. What can increase the greatest amount of cells? We successfully created a scaffold that encourages cell growth for bones," she said. "We learned it is better to use your own bone cells to encourage growth."

Jenny put in long hours on her project while working with Mary Catherine last summer - sleeping in the lab bathrooms and eating a lot of take-out food. "It was fun, but intense," she said. After camp ended, the two kept in touch via e-mail and phone, working hard to keep up with their regular school work while finishing their research.

Their time and efforts paid off. Last fall, they became the southwestern regional team finalists in the 2006-07 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, the nation’s premier high school science competition. The win moved them on to the national competition in December in New York City where they finished in fifth place.