Congratulations on being a Siemens Competition Semifinalist!

 John Jay High School senior Kailas Amin has been named a semi-finalist in the 2017 prestigious Siemens Competition, the nation’s premier competition in math, science and technology for high school students. “Their projects represent some of the most noteworthy and exceptional of those submitted and reflected an advanced level of STEM research,” said David Etzwiler, CEO of the Siemens Foundation.

Kailas Amin’s project, entitled “Convergence Properties of Validation Techniques for Simulation Based Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Based Parameter Estimation” was selected from more than 1,860 innovative individual and team research projects. Amin was mentored by Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics and political science and Director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University.

“A lot of computer programs rely on random numbers to predict things like the weather, financial markets, and elections,” said Amin, explaining his project. “We can’t generate these numbers accurately. My project looked at one aspect of the importance of that.”

Amin worked on the project as part of John Jay’s Science Research program, a three-year intensive experience that allows students to explore areas of science that interest them. This was his second project.

“Kailas is currently working on another project at the Princeton Plasma Physics lab as part of an internship and spends every Thursday and Friday there,” said Annmarie Lipinsky, science teacher at John Jay High School. 

“A combination of flexibility in John Jay’s Science Research program and on the part of the administration allows students such as Kailas to be able to participate in professional level experiences during the school year,” said Dr. Linda Burke, Instructional Leader, Science, John Jay High School. “We are very proud of his achievements.”