Lifelong friends win spot in international science fair

Richard Fu’s interest in all things science began at an early age. On school holidays, he would often accompany his mother, an immunologist, to her lab at UAB where he observed her various experiments.

 “At first I was really young and not that interested, but eventually I started to want to figure out what it was all about,” he said.

 The now 17-year-old Fu, a junior at Vestavia Hills High School, has made great strides in figuring it out — to the point that he and teammate Danielle Wu were chosen to take part with more than 1,700 other students from around the world in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair 2017 in May in Los Angeles.

 Fu and Wu, a 17-year-old junior at Indian Springs School who lives in Hoover, have been lifelong friends. But while both Wu’s parents work in scientific fields — mom in cellular and molecular pathology and dad in oral microbiology — her interest in science came about only after she began attending UAB’s community outreach camps.

 “I began going to the summer science camps in the eighth grade and really enjoyed it,” Wu said.

 The project that brought Fu and Wu their international recognition began in the summer of 2015 when the two worked at Wu’s father’s UAB lab studying the potential effects of yogurt on humans.

 “We looked at various popular yogurt brands by growing bacteria from the yogurt in plates and testing their ability to increase the human metabolism,” Fu said.  “And it appeared to be Chobani that had the best potential benefits for humans.”

 While they weren’t paid for their work, the two submitted the project to the Central Alabama Regional Science Fair hosted by UAB, placing first in biology there, then second place in the state competition in microbiology and named one of the top 20 projects in Alabama.

 The pair went their separate ways for summer jobs in 2016 — Fu taking an internship under Etty “Tika” Benviniste, professor and chair of the UAB Department of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology, and Wu working in a biomedical engineering program at UAB.

 But their yogurt project continued to call, and the two decided to expand their work.

 “During the initial project, we had found specific bacteria strains in different yogurts, so next we took the two strains and tested them on their potential effects on the human immune system,” Fu said.

 Both increased the growth of anti-inflammatory immune cells, potentially making the immune system better capable to fight certain diseases such as heart and brain, including multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s, he said.

 “In addition, we tested one of the three existing short-chain fatty acids in the yogurt and concluded that one of these, the butyrate, not only strengthened the anti-inflammatory immune system but also suppressed the inflammatory system,” Fu said.

 “This was a continuation of the project from the summer before, which we started because we saw that research about the human microbiome was increasing, and we had the idea that yogurt and the probiotics associated with it could promote human health,” Wu said.

 Submitting their results to the Central Alabama Regional Science and Engineering Fair at UAB in March, the two said they were ecstatic to be chosen for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

 “I was very, very excited. A friend had gone to the international fair last year and loved the experience,” Wu said. “It just means so much because all the hard work we’ve done has paid off.”

 Awards for the Intel ISEF range from monetary — a total of $4 million with the highest single award being $75,000 — to scholarships to trips to all-expense-paid trips to different scientific study opportunities around the world.

 Fu, who often works as a volunteer at Children’s at Alabama and wants to pursue cardiology as a career, said the duo’s reaching the ISEF “hasn’t fully hit me yet.”

 “I don’t seem to be stressed about it, though I know I should be,” he said prior to the ISEF. “I guess it just seems so far away.”

 Also, Wu, who is a hospital volunteer at UAB and the VA and looking at biomedical engineering as a possible college major, said she is amazed at the pair’s success.

 “I’m so grateful to be competing with people from all over the country and world,” she said. “Of course, I’d love to win, but it wouldn’t even matter what we won. Just to be recognized would be such an honor.”