Bangor High School senior, SMART participant wins national contest, media report
Bangor Daily News, WABI (Channel 5), Portland Press Herald and Society for Science & the Public reported a Bangor High School senior who invented a gadget for improving water quality received one of three first-place awards — worth $150,000 — at the Intel Science Talent Search awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. The awards are a program of the Society for Science & the Public and the nation’s most prestigious precollege science and math competition, according to the BDN. Paige Brown won the First Place Medal of Distinction for Global Good, which recognizes a finalist who demonstrates great scientific potential through their passion to make a difference, the BDN reported. Brown participated in the NSF-EPSCoR supported Stormwater Management Research Team (SMART) program at UMaine in 2014 and 2015, and studied the water quality of six environmentally impaired local streams with high E. coli levels and five with high phosphate contamination levels. Aria Amirbahman, a UMaine professor of civil and environmental engineering, advised Brown on her award-winning project, helping her with experimental design and data modeling. Some of Brown’s work for the project was conducted on campus at the CES Environmental Chemistry Lab and the Woodard Environmental Engineering Lab. She also collaborated in her research with UMaine graduate student Sudheera Yaparatne. The BDN and WABI (Channel 5) also published follow-up reports after interviewing Brown.