Seniors William Chen and Dorothy Hu are Siemens Competition semi-finalists.

The Siemens Competition is a Siemens Foundation initiative that works to promote interest and excellence in STEM fields by awarding college scholarships to the students who show the most potential.  Students can compete by submitting research proposals on the topics of their choice.

According to Chen, his project was centered on material science and discovering whether certain materials can be “applied to valleytronics devices.”  The project gave him research experience that he hopes to apply in the future.

“I feel delighted to have received such an award,” Chen said.

Hu’s project works to reduce the amount of time necessary to take an MRI scan.

“This project presents a new fat suppression method for fMRI (functional MRI) that uses a special design of spectral-spatial (SPSP) pulses to preferentially excite only the water protons in a given sample,” Hu said.  “This technique, if successful, could shorten scanning time by combining scan time with fat suppression time.”