Michelle Hua won first place for her development of an artificial intelligence-based algorithm used for human action recognition. She received the $75,000 George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award, named in honor of the pioneering drug discoverer and Regeneron co-founder, who is currently Regeneron’s President and Chief Scientific Officer. Using human silhouettes, she designed and implemented a novel deep learning framework that outperforms all similar state-of-the-art algorithms.

Catherine Kim received one of two Regeneron Young Scientist Awards of $50,000 for creating a novel hierarchical machine learning model that is able to predict adverse drug reactions with 91% accuracy, along with their underlying biological mechanisms.

Daniel Shen also received the Regeneron Young Scientist Award of $50,000 for his development of an AI-powered facial-cue control module. Its high speed accelerates scientific discoveries, medicine research and many other fields driven by large amounts of temporal data. The new algorithm has been adopted by researchers in sepsis shock diagnosis and hurricane predictions.

For the second time in its 80-year history, the Regeneron Science Talent Search was held virtually in order to keep finalists and their families safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The winners were selected from 1,760 applications received from 611 high schools across 45 states; Washington, D.C.; Puerto Rico; and 10 countries.

The Broadcom MASTERS took place virtually for a second year, with students competing in team challenges online. The finalists analyzed biodiversity in their local communities, designed clinical trials, constructed gliders and developed functional programs using Raspberry Pis.