By Jacob Chang

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For the past three years, Senior Viola Mocz has dedicated much of her time toward scientific research. Recently, Mocz entered the Intel Science Talent Search (STS), a program dedicated to finding and recognizing America’s top high school scientists. After a three-month screening period, Mocz was announced as one of only 40 finalists from around the country, and the only one to represent Hawaii. The competition will be held in Washington D.C. from March 9 to 11.

“(Mocz is) a successful student because of her attitude. She’s very driven. She’s very talented (and) gifted in terms of academic performance. But I’m also impressed by how motivated she is,” said Science Fair Coordinator and Mocz’s current Advanced Placement (AP) Biology teacher Nel Venzon, “She never misses a deadline (and) she’s never late. She’s one of those students that is almost always positive in terms of attitude.” Mocz’s former AP Chemistry teacher Matthew Capps added, “(Mocz is) amazingly intelligent, probably one of the top three students I’ve had in my 15 years of teaching. She’s also extremely hard-working and polite and nice.”

STS is a prestigious program, with over 1,800 applicants each year. From those applicants, 300 were selected as semifinalists and a few weeks later, the projects were reviewed a second time and a pool of 40 finalists were chosen. “(STS) is a competition where you submit a college level research report on any scientific topic and you have to be a high school senior to enter,” said Mocz. For her project, Mocz has researched and created a model to find the physical properties of subatomic particles such as mass, angular momentum and spin using topology and toroidal physics, a concept she came up with by herself.

Aside from presenting her scientific research, Mocz also went through a rigorous application process answering questions not only about her project, but also her inspiration and motivation for the project and pursuing a career in science.

With such a selective screening process, Mocz was the only finalist from Hawaii and in March she will fly to Washington D.C. to present her project to the STS judges as well as the general public. “I’m very excited. I hope to represent Hawaii well, and I didn’t expect to become a finalist at all, really, so I am just very excited for this opportunity,” said Mocz. Venzon added, “To have someone from Hawaii to compete at the national level, it’s remarkable.”

At the competition, over $650,000 of scholarship money is available and all 40 finalists are given $7,500 for their participation. Mocz’s flight will be paid by Intel and she will compete for prizes ranging from $20,000 to $100,000. “(Mocz) breathes science. To me she’s one of those that she’s so passionate about science that you can see it just by the way she performs,” said Venzon, “She’s just a scientist, she’s a problem solver.”

Regardless of the results of the upcoming competition, Mocz hopes to major in particle physics and continue her research so that it may help people in the future. “(Science is) important to me because I really want to learn more about the universe itself,” expressed Mocz, “I hope to help other people with my research because particle physics has a lot of applications in technology.”

In the meantime, Mocz strives to improve her research as she prepares for both STS and the National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, another science research competition.