On March 28th, under the shadow of Mount Sentinel, six FYR employees volunteered their time to judge at the 67th Annual Montana Science Fair held at the University of Montana. FYR also had the pleasure to present two awards for the “Most Innovative Project” at the fair. FYR’s President, Sarj Patel, PhD, presented these awards. Of the opportunity, Sarj states, “The research projects presented by Eden Maxwell and Riley Sweeney at the 67th Montana Science Fair were great examples of creative solutions applied to understand and solve complex problems. They were both worthy recipients of the FYR Most Innovative Project awards.”
For FYR’s Aurora Krebs, the opportunity was a family affair as her own husband also judged at the event as a UM PhD candidate. Aurora says, “It was great to support budding young scientists by helping them to ask analytical questions and experience their passion for science!” Stash Wrobel, a FYR lab technician, competed in the University’s Science Fair only a decade ago and noted how his experience was different from this year’s due to the new technology available. Of getting the opportunity to judge, he said, “What I most enjoyed was seeing how a lot of the kids took advantage of new technology and tried to implement it into their experiments. I saw a lot of instances where the participants would generate computer models or write code for a new program to achieve their results.”
The University’s science fair has been contributing to the interest of young people in careers in science, mathematics, engineering, and related fields since 1955. The program has reached over 20,000 students statewide. To learn more about the science fair, you can follow this link. Keep an eye out for this volunteer opportunity again next year!