Senior Swapnil Garg and junior Katherine Tian were named regional winners in the 2017 Siemens Competition on Nov. 6 for their development of an autobiotic classifier to assess the severity of kidney cancer, advancing to the national finals.

“Our project is on automatically classifying images of kidney cancer cells,” Swapnil said. “Usually pathologists manually grade these images to determine the severity of a cancer, so we built an automatic classifier to do it, which is much faster and also correlates well with prognosis, which is the forecast for how long a patient will survive.”

The pair began their research during a summer internship at the Heng Lab, a part of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of the Harvard Medical School, under the guidance of her mentor, Assistant Professor Pathology Dr. Jan Heng. She continued her research with Swapnil during the school year and also received advice from members of the upper school science department.

“I learned a lot about the way cancer works, clinical management, [and] a lot about pathology and histology on the biology side, and also how to use algorithms [and] data analytics as well as more soft-core skills like how to write a good paper, what working in a research lab would be like [and] what life is like as a researcher,” Katherine said.

Katherine kept contact with her mentor throughout the process even though she had to stop her internship early in order to go to math camp. She gave her final presentation for the internship via skype.

A few days before they presented to the judges, the team gave a presentation of their project to the science department, and the teachers that listened offered feedback as well.

“The science department really supports students through not only our regular academic courses, but also the research program and through after school programs to provide students [with] the opportunity to engage in independent research,” upper school Science Department Chair Anita Chetty said.

Regional finalists were each awarded $1,000 in college scholarship money and participated in the Regional Finals. They competed virtually in one of six regional competitions over three consecutive weekends in November. The six regions include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Notre Dame, The University of Texas at Austin, California Institute of Technology, and Georgia Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University.

The team was announced as a regional winner on Nov. 6. Katherine and Swapnil each received an additional $3,000 and advanced to the National Finals, which will be held at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. from Dec. 1 to 5.

Ten upper school students were named semifinalists for the competition on Oct. 17. Seniors Amy Dunphy, Swapnil Garg and Amy Jin; juniors Erin Liu, Ashwin Rammohan, Katherine Tian, Laura Wu and Katherine Zhang; and sophomores Cynthia Chen and Jin Tuan were recognized for their work in the research competition.

This piece was originally published in the pages of the Winged Post on November 16, 2017.

Correction: November 17, 2017

A previous version of this article incorrectly named the Heng Lab as the Beck Lab. The article has been edited to correct this error.