Maunakea Scholars Students Go to the International Science Fair
Kai Greenlee (center) at the International Public Policy Forum Finals
Every spring, students from around the world gather for the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. This year’s fair took place on May 10-16th in Columbus, Ohio. Among the Hawaiʻi students participating was Kai Greenlee, a senior at Kealakehe High School.
Kai’s project “Distributional Differences in Iron Equivalent Widths Among Supernova Progenitor Candidate Stars and Stable Spectral Mirrors” included data from the Canada-France-Hawaiʻi Telescope. His project included a mix of archival data and his own data taken as part of the Maunakea Scholars program. Kai received telescope time on the ESPaDOnS spectrograph at CFHT in May 2024, the end of his junior year in high school.
The Maunakea Scholars
Kai spent time over the summer and into the fall working on his project with guidance from his mentor, Dr. Doug Simons, director at the UH Institute for Astronomy. Kai compared a population of supernova progenitor candidate stars, stars that have been identified individually as stars expected to supernova soon, to a population of stars that share many of the same physical characteristics but have not been identified as such. His goal was to determine if the progenitor candidate stars feature a distinct iron absorption profile, which they did, potentially laying the foundation for a novel progenitor candidate identification technique.
“Kai put an incredible amount of work into his project, and it certainly ranks among the most sophisticated Maunakea Scholars projects conducted to date,” said Simons.
Kai received the top prize at the West Hawaiʻi Science Fair in February, qualifying him for both the Hawaiʻi State Science Fair and the International Science and Engineering Fair. At the state fair in late March, Kai won 1st Place in the Senior Physics and Astronomy division, plus the Hawaiʻi Astronomical Society prize and one of the prizes offered by the McInerny Foundation prizes. In addition to his science fair prizes, he has received a full scholarship from the Jean Estes Epstein Charitable Foundation at the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation.
Kai will attend Columbia next year, where he hopes to major in biomedical engineering and minor in astrophysics. He has a particular interest in oncology, so he wants to pursue medical research as an undergraduate. His goal is to attend medical school, possibly a MD/PhD program, allowing him to practice both clinical and research medicine.
“My favorite part of this experience was definitely working with real data from Maunakea,” said Kai. “There’s something surreal about seeing a spectrum on my screen and knowing it was collected by a telescope right here in Hawaiʻi. I also really enjoyed the challenge of figuring out how to clean and analyze the data myself.”
