Cumberland students present award-winning STEM projects to council

Summary

Two Cumberland High School students presented science‑fair projects: Arjun Desari described a $500 automated column‑chromatography robot for microfossil analysis; Shivan Jha presented TagCAS, a 3‑D–aware CRISPR off‑target predictor that reported ~0.9 AUC in model testing. Councilors praised the students and wished them well in national competition.

Council honored local students who won regional science-and-engineering recognition and invited them to present their projects.

Arjun Desari demonstrated a low-cost automated column chromatography prototype intended to let small labs process microfossil samples more affordably. Desari said a comparable off‑the‑shelf machine costs about $5,000, while his prototype hardware cost approximately $500 and can process roughly 12 samples in a fixed run with limited supervision. He said the project, done with Brown University collaboration, aims to make paleoclimate analysis more accessible to smaller labs.

Shivan Jha presented 'TagCAS,' a computational, 3‑D–aware algorithm for predicting CRISPR‑Cas9 off‑target edits using Hi‑C contact maps and accessibility metrics. Jha described training data sources (CRISPR SQL database), model features and an ablation study showing that inclusion of 3‑D features improved performance; Jha reported a precision‑recall area under curve of about 0.9 on held‑out tests and said lab validation is a planned next step.

Councilors congratulated both students, asked about next steps (college plans, lab validation), and encouraged the town to continue engaging students in local problem-solving efforts.