Congratulations to 11th grade Pulaski Academy high school students Akshara Chevireddy and Nyera Ali and their University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences mentor, Dr. Reine Protacio. Nyera and Akshara recently won three prestigious awards for their research project on the efficiency of precise genome editing. They earned third place in the Cellular and Molecular Biology division of the 43rd annual Central Arkansas Regional Science and Engineering Fair, which was held at the University of Arkansas Little Rock on February 28th, 2025. They subsequently won first place in Microbiology at the 71st annual Arkansas State Science and Engineering Fair, which was held at the University of Central Arkansas on April 4th and 5th. They also won the Outstanding Project Award from the Society for In Vitro Biology. In addition, Akshara and Nyera were among the seven students from Arkansas who were selected to compete in the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, the world’s largest international STEM research competition for high school students. The week-long ISEF event, with nearly 2,000 finalists from more than 60 countries, regions and territories, will be held in Columbus, Ohio from May 10th-16th, 2025. Nyera and Akshara conducted their award-winning research in the laboratory of Dr. Wayne Wahls in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biologyat UAMS. This research and training opportunity was supported in part by a research project grant (grant number GM145834) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the National Institutes of Health.