Students to be Recognized at Science and Engineering Fair

Think high school students can't make a huge impact on the world?

Think again. Brittany Wenger, a senior at Out-of-Door Academy, has made a difference in the lives of people who suspect they may have breat cancer with her science project last year. She designed a global network, cloud4cancer, for hospitals to use to improve the success of "fine needle aspirates" and to reduce the invasiveness of early diagnosis and help women get treated earlier with less cost, according to the description of her project on Google.

Lockheed Martin is set to recognize this year's most promising young local scientists at its annual awards ceremony, The Lockheed Martin Manatee Regional Science and Engineering Fair, Thursday beginning at 6 p.m. in the auditorium at Braden River High School, 6545 S.R. 70 E.

More than 240 Manatee District science and engineering students from middle schoolers to seniors in high school competed for awards in 14 different scientific categories as part of the Lockheed Martin Manatee Regional Science and Engineering Fair held during the Manatee County Fair.

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A team of 50 area science and engineering professionals evaluated the research projects and selected the winners for special honors. Winners at the local level will advance to compete at the State Science and Engineering Fair to be held at in Lakeland March 26-28, 2013. Two winners at the regional competition will move on to the International Science and Engineering Fair to be held in Phoenix, Arizona, in May.

Brittany Wenger, the senior at Out-of-Door Academy, will be a featured speaker at the ceremony.

Her project was inspired by seeing the impacts of breast cancer on family and friends.  The resulting cloud4cancer has achieved 99.11% sensitivity to malignancy in early trials and 7.6 million trials demonstrated the network improves as more data is deposited.

Because it is delivered as a cloud service, it is designed to support usage by every hospital in the world. Since the Google Science Fair, she has been able to share her research by speaking at TEDxWomen, Google Zeitgeist, TEDxAtlanta, breastcancer.org, visiting CERN and attending the Equal Futures Partnership Launch at the UN General Assembly.

Brittany attended middle school in Manatee County and participated in her first science fair as a Manatee County School District student.