UPDATE: San Marcos High School (SMHS) sent six teams to the Alamo Regional Science & Engineering Fair over the weekend and brought home six ribbons.

SMHS students received Best in Category, first, second, fourth, a director’s award, and an honorable mention. Three of the six projects at shown at regionals are advancing to the Texas Science & Engineering Fair at Texas A&M in late March.

Junior Sebastian Russo, whose plant immunology project was featured on Spectrum News, received Best in Category (one of top three in show) and $68,000 in scholarships. Russo also received an automatic invitation to the International Science & Engineering Fair that will be held in May in Anaheim, California.

ORIGINAL STORY:

SAN MARCOS, Texas – 'Tis the season for science fairs and several Texas schools are competing at regional competitions throughout the state in February.

  • Six teams from San Marcos High School going to regional fair
  • One student’s project looks at plant science
  • If they win, will go on to state competition in March

San Marcos High School is sending six teams to the Alamo Regional Science & Engineering Fair at St. Mary's University to show off their projects.

Junior Sebastian Russo won the SMHS science fair and is hoping that win's momentum will carry over to the regional competition when he presents his project in the field of plant sciences.

"I think it's truly overlooked. I think a lot of a lot of kids kind of dismiss it as something that's you know ‘Oh, plant science— not that interesting.’ But I think it's pretty interesting," Russo said. "And after spending eight, nine months really engrossed in the literature, I find it truly fascinating to add my own angle to the literature."

Russo began prepping for regionals this summer when he took on an internship at the Kang Lab at Texas State University.

"Through the lab meetings and all the papers I read, and the research that I shadowed, I really got interested in this whole idea of understanding the immune system of plants and how it differs and compares to humans. And a lot of the evidence out there actually shows that there are a lot of parallels between plants and animal immune systems," Russo said.

​Taking that research, Russo created his science fair project that tests a plant’s response to stress. ​

"We’ll inject them with a solution that contains the pathogen that we’re trying to image the response of in the plant,” Russo said. "In school I've done science fairs before and you know maybe they've been a bit smaller and testing like the efficiency of batteries or whatever, not quite like this."

Sebastian knows this project can stretch far beyond just a win at the science fair. He’s hoping to create long-term implications like improving crops, and ensuring better fuel, fiber, and food production.

“No it isn’t, it isn't just the science fair, it's true plant science research. It is really in depth and specific and really frontier. So, yeah, we're looking, hopefully, to see how it goes and if further experiments sort of prove the hypotheses we've set for ourselves then hopefully we can look to publishing later on," Russo said.

Russo is a part of five teams from SMHS competing at the Alamo Regional Science Fair. Finalists from regionals will advance to the statewide competition to be held at Texas A&M in March.