🇺🇸 Natasha Kulviwat

The award and what it is for

The Gordon E. Moore Award for Positive Outcomes for Future Generations is given at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair to a project judged to carry clear public benefit. In 2023 it was worth $50,000, and the Society for Science named Kulviwat as its winner at the fair in Dallas on 18 and 19 May.

She was 16. The award placed her level with the fair's Young Scientist Award winners and directly below the $75,000 top prize, which went to Kaitlyn Wang of San José, California, for an exoplanet-detection algorithm.

What the study examined

According to the organiser's summary, the work analysed brain tissue from twenty individuals and looked for markers that distinguished those who had died by suicide. It reported elevated neuroinflammation and raised levels of claudin-5, a protein involved in the tight junctions that hold the blood-brain barrier together.

The reported implication was preventive rather than descriptive: if such markers are reliable, the Society's summary suggests, they could support interventions using anti-inflammatory drugs. That is the finding as published by the fair. No peer-reviewed paper, tissue-bank name, supervising laboratory or statistical detail appears in this record, and a sample of twenty is small enough that the result belongs in the category of early research rather than established medicine.

Why biological markers are pursued at all

Risk assessment in mental health rests largely on what a person says and what a clinician observes. A measurable biological signal would not replace that, but it would add a second, independent line of evidence in a field that has very few.

Neuroinflammation is one of the more actively studied candidates precisely because anti-inflammatory treatments already exist. Claudin-5 belongs to the same story from a different angle: the integrity of the barrier between blood and brain. Work of this kind is normally done by postdoctoral researchers with access to post-mortem tissue collections, which is what makes a high-school finalist presenting it unusual.

It is also a field where negative results matter. Candidate biomarkers in psychiatry have a long history of appearing in small studies and failing to replicate in larger ones, which is why researchers describe findings of this kind as directions for further work rather than as tests ready for a clinic.

The fair

Regeneron ISEF 2023 brought more than 1,600 finalists from 49 US states and 64 countries to Dallas, competing for nearly $9 million in awards. Two $50,000 Regeneron Young Scientist Awards went to Saathvik Kannan of Columbia, Missouri, for computational work on mpox, and to a team from Bangkok for an insecticide alternative using green lacewings.

Maya Ajmera, president and chief executive of the Society for Science, said she was "humbled by the creativity and determination demonstrated by these exceptional students." Finalists reach the fair only by winning an affiliated competition first.

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: the award, its value, her age, her home town and the description of the findings, published by the organisation that ran the competition.

Open: the laboratory she worked with, any publication, the provenance of the tissue, and everything after May 2023. This page reports the research as the fair described it and makes no medical claim of its own. Anyone in distress should contact local emergency services or a crisis line rather than treat research findings as guidance.