BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — An 8th grader from Glasgow Middle School is making a name for herself in the STEM field.
Abigail Qi was recently named top 300 middle school innovators in Broadcom Masters national STEM competition.
Qi got involved in STEM when she was in the sixth grade. Over the past two years, she has won several math and science competitions.
”It’s kind of more fun for me than anything thing. I like reading in my spare time about science so that helps a lot and math is kind of interesting to me. It’s like a challenge to me and it is always really rewarding whenever you can figure out a problem,” said Qi.
One of her most recent projects was for the Society of Science. She’s working to find safer ways to protect Louisiana’s seafood industry.
“My project was on predatory and prey relationship of Bdellovibrio and like organisms, also known as BALO and Vibro. Vibro is a type of pathogenic bacteria that’s harmful to both humans and sea creatures. It’s been associated with major oyster hatchery crashes around the world. Traditionally, they use antibiotics to combat this, but the problem right now is antibiotic resistance,” said Qi.
Her experiment showed that BALO’s can control the population of certain types of Vibrio bacteria and hopefully reduce the number of Vibrio infection cases.
“STEM is important to me because it can lead to the development of new techniques and technologies that can that can better our world,” said Qi.
She hopes more people will get involved in STEM to help change the world especially women.
“I think its important to encourage girls to do STEM, math and science because they can be really good at it,” said Qi.
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