Dear friends!
On behalf of the Sakha Junior Science Academy, I would like to wish you all a healthy and fruitful New Year!
This passing year was a challenging year for all of us!
The Academy is in the online format since March, with many planned offline events canceled.
At the start of the year, two of the academy members took part in the International Science Youth Forum (ISYF), a science enrichment program at the kind invitation of the world-known Hwa Chong Institution (HCI). Students have undertaken collaborative tasks with their peers from all over the world and met Nobel Laureate, Sir Konstantin Novoselov. I am ever so thankful to professor Kwek and Lady Kim for their generosity of spirit and help extended to our Academy. Many members of the Academy had benefited from the wonderful Singapore experience.
I want to thank thousands of our members for their active participation in various online courses, activities, and phenological experiments. Our Academy online community carried out these experiments. It was a remarkable success: encompassing the entire territory of Yakutia, which no less than 3 million square kilometers.
My Science Summer 2020 is an exciting experience to see how many different plants and insects, birds, and butterflies can find and study in their backyard. It is an ongoing enterprise, and you can see the results of that on the website https://phenonet.ru/
In October, we held our traditional International Tuymaada olympiad online in Math only. Again it was a singular success attracting more than 200 participants from different countries. My sincere thanks for taking part in the Tuymaada Olympiad!
In November, members of the Academy took part in the Asia-Pacific Conference for Young Scientists. I want to thank Dr Monika Roharti for your kind invitation! It was an excellent experience for our members.
This year some of our active members received high accolades.
Kirill Kynitsin from Neryungri took the Scientia Vinces Award, the First President of the Sakha Republic His Excellence Mikhail Nikolaev personal award for the academic achievements as a school student. This year Kirill became the Russian Education Ministry Year 2020 Grant Recipient for Excellence in Math and Computer Sciences. Andrei Petrov of Yakutsk also received this grant. This year Andrei won a prestigious grant to work on his Cansat project.
Congratulations to both of you!
Another good news is that our member Artem Vasiliev enrolled in one of the top Asian universities, KAIST, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. He is the first Yakutian undergraduate student ever to enroll and get a scholarship at that university.
So I would like to sum up that this year was a watershed year for going all digital and online, which coincided with the Academy becoming a regional center for the development of gifted and talented students under the auspices of the Sirius Educational Center of Sochi. And as such, we are expanding our activities. As a token of this development, one of our newish members, Pavel Kuprianov, took part in the competition in Izmir in piano and won the gold medal. Please enjoy his play! I wish you all a very Happy New Year!