Washington DC. March 12, 2019. Adam Ardeishar, 17, of Alexandria, Virginia, won third place in the 2019 Regeneron and Society for Science & the Public school contest. His project combined a classic previously unsolved math problem called the “coupon collector problem” with extreme value theory. He was awarded $150,000 in prize money.

The contest is America's oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors. Forty finalists were honored. 

The extreme value theory which Ardeishar worked on is used to determine the likelihood of a maximal event, such as a 1,000-year flood. By integrating it with the “coupon collector problem,” Ardeishar developed a way to calculate the average maximum values of distributional datasets, which could be applied to predicting the expected amount of time for a given number of different randomly-timed events to occur.

In total, Regeneron awarded $3.1 million in prizes through the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2019, including $2,000 to each of the top 300 scholars and their schools.

Ana Humphrey, 18, of Alexandria, Virginia, won the top award of $250,000 for her mathematical model to determine the possible locations of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — that may have been missed by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. The second place award and $175,000 went to Samuel Weissman 17, of Rosemont, Pennsylvania for his project analyzing the genetic makeup of HIV in two patients on long-term anti-retroviral therapy to understand why they continued to have “reservoirs” of treatment-resistant HIV-infected cells.

“I couldn’t be prouder of this year’s Regeneron Science Talent Search top winners, who are already leading the way in scientific research and innovation,” said Maya Ajmera, President and CEO of Society for Science & the Public, Publisher of Science News and 1985 Science Talent Search alum. “Their talent, dedication and desire to make a difference in the world is commendable. Congratulations to Ana, I know her example will inspire other young people to get involved in STEM.”

In 2017, Regeneron became the third sponsor of the oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors, now known as the Regeneron Science Talent Search following Westinghouse from 1942-1997 and Intel from 1998-2016.