Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts senior Mary Jia has earned national recognition in the 78th Regeneron Science Talent Search.
Jia of Stuttgart was named one of 300 top scholars in the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and mathematics competition for high school seniors. The competition was founded by the Society for Science and the Public and is sponsored by biotechnology company Regneron. Almost 2,000 students entered the competition. She was the only student from Arkansas to receive recognition in the contest.
As a scholar, Jia will receive $2,000. ASMSA also will receive $2,000 to use toward STEM-related activities. Jia also advances in the competition to be considered for further recognition. The organization will select 40 finalists who will each receive $25,000 and be invited to Washington, D.C., for a final competition in March. The top prize is $250,000. The finalists will be announced Jan. 23.
She is the first ASMSA student to receive recognition in the competition since 2012.
Jia conducted her research at the Harry K. Dupree Stuttgart National Aquaculture Research Center. She studied the blast disease resistance of three strains of rice through mutagenesis testing of genes within the rice strains. Jia studied genes related to the disease resistance in the wild-type rice cultivar Katy as well as two previously mutated strains — M2354 and LMM1.
Previous research had revealed some results on which gene sets were susceptible to the blast disease. Jia’s research showed different results. Gene sets that were not present in Katy and LMM1 but were in M2354, making that particular strain more vulnerable to the disease. By identifying the vulnerable strains, researchers and growers can improve disease resistance and growth yield without resorting to GMO varieties.
Jia conducted the research during a summer program at the research center. She received a $600 Murphy USA Summer Research Fellowship from ASMSA to help pay for some of the testing needed for her study.
Her Regeneron Science Talent Search project was a continuation of a junior year project that she conducted at the Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center in Stuttgart. She said functional genomics is a major area of interest in biomedical research.
“I’m really curious how it works. There are a lot of mechanisms in a plant cell that we don’t know about yet,” she said.
Jia’s interest in biomedical and plant research comes naturally. Her mother, Melissa, is a molecular biologist while her father, Yulin, is a plant pathologist. They both work for the Bumpers National Rice Research Center.
Jia said her parents would take her with them to science conferences when she was younger.
“A majority of my human interaction came with these scientists at the conferences. As a kid, I would ask all these questions. I found the universe mysterious so as a child I wanted to understand everything,” she said.
It was a discussion with her parents about a book they each read called “The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements” by science reporter Sam Kean. The book focuses on the stories about how each element of the Periodic Table affected the people who discovered the elements.
One story focuses on cobalt and the development of nuclear bombs using the element. Her parents told her that certain types of cobalt mutagens are used to knock out genes to study them. That sparked her interest in doing rice research.
She also was influenced by her favorite scientist — Yuan Longping, the “father of hybrid rice.” He won a Nobel Prize in agriculture for his rice research.
Jia plans to enter the project in this year’s West Central Regional Science Fair at ASMSA. It is scheduled for the last week of February. She’d like to do some more testing to further confirm her research, but the Dupree Research Center is closed because of the current federal government shutdown.
But she is pleased and surprised with the response her research received in the competition. She said she didn’t expect to win anything.
“I had forgotten about it for a while actually,” she said. “I was surprised though because I always think that the work I do is not as good as it could be.”
Dr. Brian Monson, her adviser for the project and a physics instructor and chair of the Science Department at ASMSA, praised Jia’s dedication to her project.
“She put in a tremendous amount of work over the last two years and has been successful in sorting out the changes to the mutant varieties’ genomes,” he said. “Being named a Regeneron Science Scholar is a well-earned accolade to reward her excellent work.”