What strong projects actually look like — the question they asked, the design that survived review, and the one decision that made the difference.
Archive entries are summaries compiled for study. Read them for how a project was structured, argued, and defended — not as a template to reproduce. Copying someone else's project is the one thing that will end yours.
7 projects
Lakshmi Agrawal
First place · Regeneron ISEF 2026
Reported roughly 80% removal of the target contaminant, using 85% less energy and costing 98% less than the alternatives it was compared against.
Nikola Veselinov
First place · Regeneron ISEF 2026
A new theorem giving conditions under which an equation cannot be solved in elementary functions, developed by combining ideas from topology, symmetry and Galois theory.
Benjamin Davis
First place · Regeneron ISEF 2025
Reported about 45% greater efficiency than comparable systems at roughly 90% lower cost.
Siyaa Poddar
First place · Regeneron ISEF 2025
Low-cost detectors for toxic silica and uranium dust, built from colour-changing chemistry stabilised inside metal-organic frameworks, developed with Indigenous communities near abandoned mines in the US Southwest in mind.
Michelle Wei
First place · Regeneron ISEF 2024
A faster algorithm for second-order cone programming, a convex optimisation form that sits underneath applications in machine learning, transportation and financial systems.
Saathvik Kannan
First place · Regeneron ISEF 2023
A pipeline combining machine learning with three-dimensional comparative protein modelling to work out why mpox became more transmissible after its 2022 resurgence, focusing on the structures the virus uses to replicate.
Pannathorn Siri, Poon Trakultangmun, and Teepakorn Keawumdee
First place · Regeneron ISEF 2023
Reported a five-fold increase in lacewing survival rate.