Thirty six RKYHS students joined over 1700 Jewish high school students from across the country to present their engineering and scientific research capstone projects at the 2024 CIJE Innovation Day event held at the American Dream mall. CIJE (Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education) Innovation Day is a culmination of a year of coursework for the RKYHS 10th, 11th and 12th grade STEM students in the biomedical engineering, genetic engineering and scientific engineering classes, as well as in the SRTI (Scientific Research Training Institute). RKYHS STEM students work diligently all year long on their capstone projects, where they are tasked with conceptualizing, creating, and engineering their own inventions and solutions to real world problems.

At Innovation Day these students presented their outstanding accomplishments in 18 projects. Each student group was also required to create a website and video as well as present before judges and an audience. RKYHS students Eitan Schnur and Ru Samel took home first place in the Engineering for Healthcare category as well as Best Pitch for their 3D BioPrinter, which prints out living tissue that has been used successfully to print out mini brain organoids using glioblastoma cells that are being grown in the RKYHS tissue culture lab for development of diagnostics and potential therapeutics. Ava Drew, Abby Goldzal and Hannah Rosenfeld placed second in the Environmental Engineering category for their Algae Alert, a buoy that detects toxic algae blooms in bodies of water utilizing an RGB LED light triggered by sensors. Melanie Huppert, Jonah Klein and Aidan Korish won Best Pitch in the live presentations for their Real-Time Pollen Identification project. The project is part of a multi-institutional collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, Kean University and RKYHS, developing a device for real time identification of pollen. Students are utilizing the onsite Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and Phase contrast light microscopy in the RKYHS state-of the art microscopy lab. RKYHS is proud of all of its budding engineers for their great work!