For 2025 McLean Science Lecture Competition winner Kevin Jin ’26, the contest was a milestone in a longer scientific process, one that married his core goals: produce impactful research, and share it with peers. The annual lecture competition exists for students with that kind of drive—it’s an opportunity to chase answers to a major question outside of the St. Andrew’s curriculum, and develop the expertise and public speaking acumen to share findings in the style of a TED Talk.

Though Science Department Chair Dr. Ashley Hyde first encountered this kind of competition in a prior teaching position, she said the contest has been a bigger hit at St. Andrew’s. Saints filled Engelhard Hall in March to watch McLean finalists—Jin, as well as Abigail Delvalle ’26, Beau Taylor ’28, and Enid Appiah ’26—present their findings to students and faculty in attendance, including 2024 finalist Daisy Wang ’25 and other panel judges who selected the contest’s overall winner.

As part of the judging panel, Hyde delights in the conversational style of the presentations, and the opportunity to learn from students’ passion projects.

“The whole point is you’re bringing others into the joy of science and sharing that with others … science is such a large field and always developing, so every year I learn new things from each student’s talk,” she says. “This is something that deliberately is outside of class and outside of the syllabus, so every topic that you hear is something the student has handpicked because it spoke to them.”

Year after year, Hyde watches students build their project and their subject-matter expertise—and their scientific self-confidence, too. While Hyde and her colleagues are available to students who have their eyes on the McLean prize—helping them confirm their understanding of a concept or prepare to explain their work, for example—the students’ projects are independent research endeavors. 

For Jin, the 2025 McLean winner, the competition was a chance to discuss his research with the community on Noxontown Pond, though the work began an ocean away. Home in Shenzhen, China for the 2024 summer break, Jin was one of three Chinese National Lab of Guangzhou summer camp participants awarded scholarship funding, lab resources, and scientists’ mentorship for an individual project. Jin’s work built on a cutting-edge concept from camp—microfluidics—and would become his McLean project.

His presentation, “Rapid Testing of Antibiotics Employing Droplet Microfluidic Chip,” sought to introduce a portable, affordable, and accurate test to improve diagnosis and treatment of bacterial infections for people living in rural areas, far from major hospitals—whether they’re checking for illness with a medical clinic visit or an at-home test kit.

Microfluidics allows scientists to increase the density of bacteria in the solution. Bacteria can reproduce faster at greater density, reaching a testable volume more quickly. In the field, this would allow health professionals to identify and treat specific bacterial infections faster and more effectively—a driving concept behind Jin’s microfluidic chip, the vehicle for accurate, on-the-go testing.

“When you get a viral infection like the flu, you go to a health center or hospital and they collect samples from your nose, then you wait for 10 minutes and you have a result whether you have the flu or not,” Jin says. “My aim is to make this bacterial diagnosis more similar to a flu test, which is accessible and portable, because bacterial diagnosis is often as deadly as the flu.”

Jin finished 60 to 70 percent of his research at the National Lab. Once his junior year at St. Andrew’s was underway, he balanced a full course load and extracurricular activities with check-in meetings with Lab mentors, and crafted project proposals and poster presentations. 

During winter break, Jin used National Lab resources to start prototyping the palm-sized chip at the center of his research. Bacteria introduced to the chip are identifiable in about three hours, a major difference from the 24- to 48-hour turnaround of a typical pathology lab.

After hours in the National Lab and in St. Andrew’s library, dorms, and Amos Hall; on airplanes and in cars, Jin completed his project and prototype during spring break in March. It was easy for the emerging scientist to pinpoint the twin passions that made his work worthwhile: a desire to help improve rural communities’ health outcomes, and a love of peer-to-peer science communication.

These ideas have driven Jin academically long before his first day at St. Andrew’s. Jin’s parents grew up in rural areas of China, in communities that had worse health outcomes and less access to fast, reliable healthcare than people living in urban areas.

“Those stories gave me an attachment to this idea that improving testing in remote areas was important,” Jin says. “Then as I moved to middle school, I realized, ‘This issue exists all around the world.’ That gave me the biggest push to think of a way to not necessarily solve the issue completely, but to make it less serious.”

Jin’s drive to help solve a problem went hand in hand with another goal: producing valuable scientific work and taking it to science fairs, expos, and other competitions—not to compete with other STEM students, but to share ideas and inspiration. 

Jin was first able to present the microfluidics project at the Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting’s high school expo in Baltimore in fall 2024. Last month, he scored among the top five contestants and earned an Honorable Mention after competing in a field of about two dozen medicine- and health-related projects at the Delaware Valley Science Fairs tri-state competition, which brought together young scientists from Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

In between these competitions, Jin shared his work in the McLean contest—an exercise in public speaking and communication that he said helped him in the later contest. Communicating scientific concepts clearly to an everyday audience is a core piece of the McLean experience, Hyde says.

“It’s showing that they’re not just competent scientists, but they’re also skilled public communicators, which is such a huge and important skill set in science that is perhaps underrepresented,” Hyde says. “We talk a lot at St. Andrew’s about how students do the work of the professionals of the discipline—of historians, of writers, of artists, of mathematicians, of scientists. This is a chance to literally give them the microphone to stand on stage and do their thing.”