J.E. Cosgriff Memorial School 8th-grader receives top award at Diocesan Science Fair

Friday, Mar. 06, 2015

SALT LAKE CITY —At the 19th annual Diocesan Science Fair on Feb. 21, the Young Scientist of the Year award was presented to Constance Viollet, an 8th-grade student at J.E. Cosgriff Memorial School in Salt Lake City.

Viollet also received first place in the Medical/Behavioral Science Overall 8th grade category and the Overall Medical/Behavioral Science Award.

The fair is sponsored by the Utah Knights of Columbus.

“Her experiment did so well because she used the scientific method of problem solving,” said Jim Larson, who teaches math and science at Cosgriff.

Viollet’s experiment was about a motor neuron disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Her hypothesis dealt with identifying by a blood sample when a change occurs in the normal balance between protein synthesis and protein degradation.

“During atrophy, there is a down-regulation of protein synthesis pathways, and activation protein degradation, a mutation,” said Viollet.

The pathophysiology of the disease was examined by analyzing the function of the encoded protein in a two-week period of experiments and observation in a laboratory, she said.

“My father is a scientist and he helped me come up with the hypothesis,” said Viollet.

She worked in her father’s laboratory to conduct her experiment.

“Most known disease-causing mutations in mRNAs occur within the ORF (a sequence of DNA) and thus affect the sequence or reading frame of the encoded protein,” said Viollet, “but others are in UTRs (a section of the messenger RNA), which lead to alterations in the translation of those mRNAs and, therefore, the expression of the encoded protein.”

The pathophysiology of the related sclerosis can be explained by the function of the encoded protein, as her experiment demonstrated, she said. The solution to detecting the mutation is taking a blood sample.

For her future, Viollet wants to pursue a scientific career, she said. 

Larson said that Viollet’s perseverance is outstanding. “She truly wants to have a deep understanding, and she continues to persevere until she has a deeper understanding of the content she is working on,” he explained.

According to Larson, Viollet’s experiment is unusual because it has an authentic application in the medical field. 

He encourages students such as Viollet to apply problem solving in their experiments. 

“I guess if you think about what problem solving is, it’s a coming up with a solution without a well-defined outlet,” said Larson, adding that in Viollet’s case, “doing science authentically rather than mimicry is really what wows you on this experience.”

To explain it a bit broader Larson used an analogy. “For example in math, part of math is skills building and repetition, but then when you go to the more abstract application of math you have to take the skills that you acquired to select those as necessary and solve the problems in the absence of the well-defined outcome. We want to get the kids thinking about this early on,” said Larson.

As one of the 65 middle-school students who received the highest scores at the diocesan science fair, Viollet will move on to compete against her peers from public and charter schools at the Salt Lake Valley Science and Engineering Fair, which will be March 24-27 at the University of Utah.