Deer Park High School juniors Kayla Cruz and Ava Sacarin recently won first place in the Medicine/Health category at the American Chemical Society’s Chemagination Competition, held on March 7 at St. John’s University in Queens.
The competition challenges high school students to imagine that they are living 25 years in the future and have been invited to write an article for “ChemMatters,” a magazine for high school students that focuses on the role of chemistry in everyday life. For this imagined article, the students must create a breakthrough or innovation in chemistry in one of four categories – Alternative Energy, Environment, Medicine/Health and New Materials – that has improved the quality of people's lives from 2025 to the year 2050, including details on the development of their invention, the science behind it and how it would work in the future. Additionally, students are asked to design a cover for the magazine. Cruz and Sacarin’s project focused on contact lenses designed to detect glucose levels in tears and monitor the health of the wearers.
“These contact lenses would basically be another smart wearable, but to the next level,” Sacarin said. “I participated in Chemagination last year, but we didn’t make it to the final round. This year, I decided to participate again, and we got a little more involved with it and ended up winning first place, which felt really good.”
“Chemagination is a great idea to show the opportunities that science has for teenagers, because this competition was geared towards teenagers,” Cruz said. “Using your imagination, there’s so much in the medical and environmental fields that can be done with science, and I think that really is shown through Chemagination, because you have the motivation of the competition, and you also actually learn a lot through your project.”
“Ava and Kayla’s inspiring love of science and vision for the future were on full display in their very impressive showing,” science teacher Ed Libretto sad. “I have no doubt this is the first of many future accomplishments by these talented students.”
Date Added: 3/24/2025