The McLean area branch of AAUW (American Association of University Women) recognized the winners of its 2024 STEM Essay Contest during the branch’s potluck dinner March 19 at the McLean Community Center.
The contest was open to seventh- and eighth-grade students (girls and boys) at eight local public and private schools. The branch had asked the students to discover and publicize women who had made a difference in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields but received little or no recognition for their contributions while alive.
The judges gave strong preference to essays about women who are not well-known even today. Each essay described one woman’s contribution and its impact, as well as why the student selected that particular woman.
Joshua Zeng, a seventh-grader at Longfellow Middle School, won first place in the contest. Honorable mentions went to Aidan Jamerson, a Longfellow Middle seventh-grader; Yanling Lin, an eighth-grader at Longfellow Middle; Hamin Park, a seventh-grader at Longfellow Middle; and Natalie Powell, a Poe Middle School seventh-grader.
As part of the awards ceremony, first-place winner Zeng read his essay on Katsuko Saruhasi, a Japanese geochemist and environmental scientist who conducted a landmark study that provided the first evidence of radioactive fallout in seawater from nuclear-weapons testing.
Other women who were the subjects of the students’ prize-winning essays were Dr. Nettie Stevens, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Dr. Marjorie Lee and Edith Clarke.
Fourteen volunteers from the branch served as judges: Pam Bacher, Beth Cooper, Christina Hamilton, Myrtle Hendricks-Corrales, Reed Isbell, Deborah Leiderman, Nina McVeigh, Tom McVeigh, Ruth Nowjack-Raymer, Judy Page, Diana Parsell, Phyllis Provenzano, Carolyn Wyatt and Phyllis Yoshida. The essay contest was managed by a steering committee consisting of Cooper, Hendricks-Corrales and Soltani-Ahmadi, along with Judy Page, the branch’s STEM chairman.
For more information on the McLean area branch of AAUW, visit http://mclean-va.aauw.net.
