Utah Catholic students shine at international environmental science competition

Courtesy photo/Madilyne Beaudry

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Shown at the 2023 Genius Olympiad are Madilyne Beaudry from St. Joseph Catholic High School in Ogden, Isabella Delagerheim from the Salt Lake Center for Science, and Aleaokalan Pindat-Kahele from Juan Diego Catholic High School in Draper.

SALT LAKE CITY — Two Utah Catholic Schools students won awards at this year’s Genius Olympiad, an international high school project competition about environmental issues held June 12-17 at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y. Both students submitted projects in the science category that grew out of AP Research classes that they took at their schools.

Earlier this year, both girls participated in the Diocesan Science Fair, where Madilyne Beaudry, an incoming senior at St. Joseph Catholic High School in Ogden, took first place overall. She went on to the University of Utah Science & Engineering Fair and received the Yale Science & Engineering award as well as placing first in Chemistry/Biochemistry.

Aleaokalan Pindat-Kahele, who recently graduated from Juan Diego Catholic High School in Draper, received second place overall in Environmental Science at the U of U fair as well as a Red Butte Garden Excellence in Plant Science award.

Also at the U of U event, both students won Genius Olympiad awards; the University of Utah paid their way to the event in New York.

At the Genius Olympiad, Beaudry, 17, received a second-place silver medal for her project, “Testing the Use of Crude Enzymes from White-rot Fungus for Sustainable Cellulose Delignification.”

“I came up with an idea based around the fact that a lot of the waste that we’re producing right now in microplastics is actually our fabric waste,” she said. “My project was initially designed to find a way to produce cellulose better as a replacement for a lot of the fabrics we use, but I learned later you can actually apply it to a lot of things like biofuel production, plastic production, fabric production, paper making, pharmaceuticals and even food production.”

Pindat-Kahele, 19, took third place and a bronze medal for her project, “The Effect of Varying Concentrations of Rock-Climbing Chalk on Thymus Vulgaris (Thyme).”

Pindat-Kahele, an accomplished rock climber, is a kindergarten rock climbing coach at Momentum Indoor Climbing in Sandy. “I’ve always been passionate about outdoor stewardship, and I really saw this project as a way to combine my two passions,” she said.

After her project showed high concentrations of rock-climbing chalk can be toxic to vegetation, Pindat-Kahele would like to pursue the research. “I was given a lot of great advice by some of the judges in the competition and I know that this is a project I want to continue in college,” she said. “I know rock climbing chalk is hurting these plants; I want to figure out why. What specific ingredient in rock climbing chalk is hurting these plants? I can work to find alternatives that are not detrimental to the plants.”

Both girls said the best part of the Olympiad, which hosted students from 60 countries, was rubbing shoulders with their international peers.

‘There were so many really interesting people there,” Beaudry said. “We made friends from Latvia, from Mozambique and Thailand. I got to meet a lot of really amazing people who were very intelligent.”

“To get to meet other teenagers that were passionate about the environmental field was great,” Pindat-Kahele said. “Even though we’re growing up on opposite sides of the world, it is so beautiful how our passion for conservation can bring all of us together.”

Pindat-Kahele hopes to continue to build some of the relationships she made at the Olympiad. Both of her parents are pilots, so she has the opportunity to travel internationally. In July she and her mother will travel to the Balkans; she has already made plans to get together there with students she met at the Olympiad.

Pindat-Kahele will attend Dartmouth College in New Hampshire this fall to pursue a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies with a minor in climate change. After graduation, she hopes to pursue scientific research in the conservation and outdoors field. Having been born in Hawaii and growing up in Utah, “I would love to work in either one of my two homes, two communities that really mean a lot to me, so I can make an impact there,” she said.

Beaudry hopes that in the future she may be able to get her paper published. She also plans to major in international relations and diplomacy in college. “I feel like there are a lot of problems in the world that unfortunately can only be solved in the world via a change in policy,” she said.