This past summer, three Manalapan High School students participated in the Governor's School of New Jersey Programs. 

This is a summer residential program for high-achieving rising high school seniors who have a strong interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The foundation of the Governor's School program is a commitment to provide an enriched educational opportunity for talented high school students that will not only be beneficial to them as individuals but will also benefit the State by preparing students to enter high-demand fields.

Riya Pawar, a Science & Engineering (S&E) senior at Manalapan High School, was selected for the Governor’s School of New Jersey in Engineering & Technology (GSET). She spent four weeks at Rutgers School of Engineering, taking courses from Rutgers professors in Digital Logic Design, Interstellar Physics, Robotics, and Game Design. She also pursued research with a Stanford Engineer and collaborated with other GSET students on the project, “A Modern Real-Time Audio Encryption System Featuring Chaos Maps and Wavelet Transform.” 

“With the rise of cyber threats, it is important that the information we share with each other is being protected against manipulation and misuse. This includes audio signal transmission, which is the focal point of our research. For our project, we proposed and developed an efficient real-time encryption system that protects the transmission of audio signals from external threats. The project’s security is guaranteed not only by the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange but also by the use of chaos maps, which generate the encryption key sequences with consistently random values. This is beneficial because it is harder for an attacker to find and exploit a pattern within the encryption algorithm. We also use a bitwise XOR operator to encrypt and decrypt the signal. Furthermore, this project is much more secure than traditional encryption systems, such as AES or DES.” 

This research was presented at the 2023 Research Symposium at Rutgers. In the beginning of October, this project was also presented at the MIT IEEE Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (URTC) and published in the IEEE XPlore Database.

Ritvik Sawhney, an S&E senior at Manalapan High School, attended the Governor’s School of New Jersey Program in Engineering & Technology, at Rutgers School of Engineering. During the program, Ritvik collaborated with other students on the project, “Machine Learning for Neural Decoding: Using EEG Signals to Detect Freezing of Gait in Parkinson’s Patients”. “We developed an AI model that helps detect when a patient will experience an episode of Freezing of Gait, which is where a patient's joints get locked when the patient is either walking or turning. When these joints "freeze," the patients are unable to take normal steps which, in many instances, results in them falling and hurting themselves. The AI model we created helps predict these episodes to warn the patient, thus allowing them to stop what they are doing and prevent further injury.” The students presented the research at the 2023 Research Symposium at Rutgers upon the competition of the program. 

Bernard Liang, an S&E senior at Manalapan High School, participated in the Governor’s School of New Jersey Program in the Sciences (GSNJS). The Governor’s School of New Jersey Program in the Sciences (GSNJS) is a 3-week residential program where students are immersed in intense college-level research on the campus of Drew University. The program introduces scholars to hands-on research experience in a student's area of interest through a series of courses, laboratories, projects, lectures, and other activities centered on math and science. Bernard attended lectures in neuroscience, medicinal chemistry, and cancer biology.  He also collaboratively conducted the research, "Formation and origin exploration of white-on-red Guangala ceramics". 

“We were sourcing pottery from an ancient Ecuadorian culture called Guangala. They had a type of white-on-red pottery found all over Ecuador and Northern Peru whose mineral and chemical composition do not match those of other Guangalan pottery, implying that they are not locally sourced, even though they were most abundant in Guangalan settlements. We tried to source them by analyzing their physical structure with thick and thin section microscopy and matching them to pottery of other cultures. During the labs, we were playing with a gene called STING that induces the antiviral state (causes immune responses like fevers and sore throats), inhibiting it to various degrees in different mammalian cell cultures. We then exposed the cells to a stimulus and measured the amount of antiviral state enzymes released by the cells.”