WY holds an annual science fair where students conduct projects that they present to judges and students alike to share the knowledge they have gained from their experiments. A select few of the top projects at this event continue to move on to regionals, city, state and even international competitions. This year, Alex Pei ’15 continued all the way to the national event representing WY with his project on miR-143.

Pei’s project began at the University of Chicago where he studied cancer. This led him to a project to understand the role of miR-143 in intestinal ApcMin, a mouse model of intestinal and mammary systems. MiR-143 is an RNA molecule that is implicated in cancer.

The project was aimed at understanding how deleting a the miR-143 gene would impact colon cancer development. Pei used mice as his test subjects and worked on eliminating this gene and studying its effects for eight weeks.

Pei noted that he was inspired to conduct the study after cancer related issues in his family.