Staples High School student Zach Effman has been selected for an internship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Research Science Institute, the Westport schools office has announced.
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Staples High School teacher Nicholas Morgan with Staples junior Zach Effman. (CLICK TO ENLARGE) Contributed photo
He is one of just 80 students selected from a worldwide pool for the prestigious internship at MIT, an announcement said. He will spend six weeks working one-on-one with a professor, developing and carrying out an intense research project. Many students enter their work in the Intel Science Talent Search.
As a Staples freshman, Zach heard Nicholas Morgan talk about the Authentic Science Research course he co-teaches.
Over the next three years, he learned he could hone in on an important topic, discover how to truly research it, then follow it through the many inevitable highs and lows of hands-on science.
Last year, as a sophomore, Zach decided to look at mathematical chaos in solar systems. He wrote code that numerically simulates how solar systems evolve over time.
Excited by the idea of doing even more science, he applied for the MIT internship. Zach is the third Staples student selected for the program.
In 2010, Yuri Lenskiy worked on theoretical aspects of quantum computers, while Tessa Green studied nuclear reactor designs. Both are now MIT undergraduates.
“Zach is a great person to work with,” said Morgan, according to a school news release. “He’s dedicated, focused and creative.”
The instructor described Zach’s computational astronomy experiment as “trying to answer how stable planetary orbits are from gravitational perturbations from other planets.”
“He’s modeling some of the many star systems recently discovered by astronomers, and looking at how stable they will be millions of years in the future,” Morgan said.
Before Staples, Zach attended Kings Highway Elementary School, and Coleytown Middle School. In addition to his Authentic Science Research work and other rigorous classes, he is captain of the math team, and a pole-vaulter in indoor and outdoor track.
