Sara Alrabiah, a Saudi student from Al Tarbiyah Al Islamiyah School won accolades for her country by winning a top NASA’s Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) award for her project on improving resistive RAMs’ performance by using single crystal Perovskites in Los Angeles recently.
“The confidence I’ve attained from my father was the major reason I pursued this path,” said Alrabiah. “I told my parents I want to work on submitting a scientific project and will need to be away for a long time at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Jeddah. My talent was then embraced and I participated in this global competition and held my country’s head high,” she said.
Explaining her research, Alrabiah said it focused on developing resistive rams that can be used for memory purposes and which has been recently proposed to replace the currently used memories.
Saudis took to social media to voice their congratulatory messages and praises for Alrabiah’s achievement, by sharing a video of her being announced the winner at the competition which went viral since her big win.
Alrabiah mentioned Professor Othman Bakr who followed up on her work and being her major reference, adding that the General Department of Education in Riyadh and King Abdulaziz and His Companions Foundation for Giftedness and Creativity also supported her to pursue this path.
She went on to express her sense of pride for participating in ISEF alongside other Saudi students who also scored impressive wins for the Kingdom.
Other Saudi students who won at the competition included Amaar Amir from Dhahran Ahliyya School for his project ‘The Effect of Expression Patterns of Ammonium Transporters on the Interaction between Corals and Their Symbiotic Dinoflagellates,’ Dana Alkhaldi form KFUPM School for her project, ‘A Novel Approach for the Preparation of High Efficiency Water Splitting Photocatalysts,’ Nadia Almutlak from Al Tarbiyah Al Islamiyah School for her project, ‘Enhancing LiFi and Lighting: CsPbBr3 Zero-Dimensional Perovskite and Quantum Dot Based Colour Converters, Dana Alkhaldi of KFUPM School for her project, ‘A Novel Approach for the Preparation of High Efficiency Water Splitting Photocatalysts’ and Ruba Alsulami of Jeddah Gifted School for her project ‘Green Nanotechnology: Increasing Sewage Water Treatment Efficiency by Using Economical Porcelanite Nanoparticles.’
ISEF is the world’s largest international pre-college science competition held annually. It brings together around 1,700 high school students competitors from all over the world. Student winners are ninth through twelfth graders who earned the right to compete at the Intel ISEF 2017 by winning a top prize at a local, regional, state or national science fair.
