Photo courtesy of Anna Schaefer, Garrison Forest, ’14. While other little kids spent their weekends watching cartoons, Garrison Forest senior Katherine Paseman focused on designing a balsa wood bridge as part of Destination Imagination’s bridge-making competition. She and her fellow teammates placed third—in the globe. Fast forward about nine years to find Paseman entrenched in another contest measuring young people’s creativity and genius, the Intel Science Talent Search. In this, the most prestigious science research competition in the nation for high school seniors, Paseman was named one of only 21 semi-finalists from Maryland; in all, 1,794 applicants entered the competition. Her project? “A New Model Relating Hemoglobin, Hematocrit, and Optical Density.” “In order for the device to work, we need a mathematical model of how light interacts with whole blood. We create one by extending existing equation-based models using intuitions from 3D geometry,” Paseman said. Huh? Super-teens—those whose achievements reveal an extreme level of intelligence,… Read More