Gold Crest Awards – to encourage innovation and creativity in problem solving: awarded by the Royal Society of New Zealand to:
- Jessie Bird (formerly Tawa College, Wellington, now at Victoria University),
- Louise Davison (formerly Morrinsville College now at Massey University),
- Anne Sim (Manurewa High, Auckland),
- Nicole Steele (Morrinsville College),
- Rebecca van Rooyen (Morrinsville College),
- Sophie Zhang (formerly Palmerston North Girls High School now at Columbia University).
The CREST scheme is the Royal Society of New Zealand’s international awards scheme designed to encourage years 6–13 students to be innovative, creative, and to problem solve in science, technology and environmental studies.
Citations:
Jessie Bird
Jessie Bird has been awarded a Gold CREST medal for her investigation into the anti microbial properties of fungi found growing in the local bush. She used a variety of methods to test for the presence of active compounds in the fungi she collected.
- For more information, see: Congratulations to Jessie Bird
Louise Davison
Louise Davison has been awarded a Gold CREST medal for her research project on making a difference to milk production through clean trough water. This included adapting a trough cover to provide a low cost, and reduced labour, method to keep drinking troughs clean.
- For more information, see: Congratulations to Louise Davison
Anne Sim
Anne Sim has been awarded a Gold CREST medal for her studies investigating the concept of whether algae could be used to reduce industrial carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
- For more information, see: Congratulations to Anne Sim
Nicole Steele
Nicole Steele has been awarded a Gold CREST medal for her investigation into whether prolonged therapy increases the bacteriological cure rate in the treatment of subclinical mastitis in lactating dairy cows. She evaluated the efficacy by varying the number of daily treatments of the injectable antibiotic penethamate to show that 6 days was significantly better than 3 or 0 days in terms of increasing the cure proportion.
- For more information, see: Congratulations to Nicole Steele
Rebecca van Rooyen
Rebecca van Rooyen has been awarded a Gold CREST medal for her research on agility in netball in particular the techniques of changing direction in a 90 degree turn and exploding into a 5 metre sprint, which are “subcategories” of technical agility. She designed an agility training program with subsequent collection and analysis to show that the students that undertook her training programme improved significantly to those that did not.
- For more information, see: Congratulations to Rebecca van Rooyen
Sophie Zhang
Sophie Zhang has been awarded a Gold CREST medal for her research into developing ways of purifying water using chemical Titanium Dioxide, plastic drink bottles and sunlight’s natural component of UV light for use in nations where many people do not have access to clean, uncontaminated water. Sophie is in her first semester studying Maths and Physics at Columbia University after having won a John Jay Scholarship.
- For more information, see: Congratulations to Sophie Zhang
