Two Lake County students — one from East Ridge high school, and one from Lake Minneola high school — won prizes at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in Columbus, Ohio, this week.

Jasmine Gaines from East Ridge was awarded a $5,000 cash prize from Oracle Academy for her project in the System Software category. Her project, titled “Project Doe: An online data platform that can provide identification to the displaced and homeless,” impressed judges with its innovation, technical skill and real-world relevance. Sponsored by Oracle Academy, a global leader in computer science education, the award recognizes exceptional student achievement and encourages the pursuit of excellence in technology. Jasmine created a centralized database platform that tracks homeless and displaced individuals and their critical information.

Jainish Patel from Lake Minneola earned 3rd place and a $1,200 cash price in the highly competitive “Robotics and Intelligent Machines” category. His category featured more than 85 projects from around the world. Jainish’s award-winning project, titled “AID – A reinforcement learning framework for Aerodynamic Iterative Optimization,” was developed with fellow students Arya Pasumarthi and Adian LaRosa. They did not attend the international fair. Jainish and teammates created an AI pipeline to automate the engineering design process for design optimization.

Congratulations to this innovative young scientists!