Lexington Park, February 4, 2006--Three St. Mary’s County high school students received cash awards from KR Systems, Inc. at the St. Mary’s County Science and Engineering Fair held at Great Mills High School in Great Mills, Maryland. Miss Stephanie Galanie and Miss Diane Mattingly, both seniors at Leonardtown High School, won the KR Systems Award for Innovation in Computer Science. Miss Stephanie Hay, a sophomore at Leonardtown High School won the KR Systems Award for Innovation in Engineering.
Miss Galanie and Miss Mattingly’s project, “Make Me a Match”, was a team entry involving the optimization of kidney donor-recipient pairs. Their project involved conducting research into current organ donor programs to understand how patients are assigned priority on the waiting list and how donor-recipient pairs are matched. Then they applied mathematical models to optimize the pair matching and wrote computer code in Visual Basic and Java to run an optimization program for a large population. If further developed and put into actual use, their optimization program could increase successful donor-recipient pairs and significantly reduce the waiting list for kidney transplant.
Miss Galanie and Miss Mattingly won first place in the Team Category and the Fair Team Grand Award in addition to the KR Systems Award for Innovation in Computer Science. Their next stop is the 58th Annual Prince George's Area Science Fair held at Prince George's Community College in Largo, Maryland on March 31 – April 2, 2006.
Miss Hay's project, “Help is on the Way: Emergency Structures”, involved making improvements on a prototype design for emergency shelters for disaster prone areas. Her idea was to replace concrete with fiberglass resin as a hardener to provide form and strength to a structure that can be assembled easily and quickly in the field. These temporary structures are designed to provide emergency shelter to people displaced from their homes by a natural disaster. Reducing the material weight by replacing concrete with fiberglass resin would more than double the number of structures that could be airlifted into a disaster area by cargo helicopter.
Hiss Hay won first place in the Engineering Category in addition to the KR Systems Award for Innovation in Engineering. She will also compete at the 58th Annual Prince George's Area Science Fair with Miss Galanie and Miss Mattingly.
This was the second year that KR Systems, Inc. has sponsored awards at the St. Mary’s County Science and Engineering Fair. KR Systems has also invited the award winners to a company dinner function on March 15 to further recognize their achievements.
Jeffrey Dronenburg Sr., the Director of the Digital Archive Division, presented the awards on behalf of KR Systems. In presenting the awards, Mr. Dronenburg quoted the President’s challenge to America from the State of the Union 2006 speech, to “continue to lead the world human talent and creativity…we need to encourage children to take more math and science, and to make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations.” Mr. Dronenburg continued by saying, “Those are ideals that KR Systems strongly supports and is why I am here today – to provide incentive and help promote interest in Science education with these two awards.”
Mrs. Gail Kelley, KR Systems Chief Executive Officer, was thrilled to have the opportunity to sponsor the awards. “KR is proud to be able to partner with our community schools to help foster enthusiasm in academic research in the sciences with the youth of today” said Mrs. Kelley. “We are excited to be able to sponsor the science fair again this year, and we look forward to being able to participate this way for many years in the future.”
KR Systems is a certified woman owned small business concern, specializing in human factors engineering for military aviation crew systems. KR Systems also offers commercial and government services in Creative Services, Information Solutions, Video and Multi-Media Production, and Digital Archiving of both paper and film medium. More information about KR Systems may be found at the company’s website at www.krsystems.com.