I'm a senior at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia. I like questions whose answers are distributions rather than numbers: how a traffic signal should be timed, where the pandemic hurt learning most, what a cutting will do if you root it a different way. I also play clarinet and write music.
A simulation study of traffic-signal timing, presented as a poster at the 2026 Joint Statistical Meetings. [needs: the question, how the simulation was built, and the main result, in two or three sentences]
Poster (PDF) [file to come]
Using Pennsylvania's statewide PSSA results, we asked whether the pandemic's learning loss fell harder on poorer students and, if so, where. It did, but not evenly: the poverty penalty concentrates in grades 3 to 5 and fades to almost nothing by grades 6 to 8, in both English language arts and math. [needs: Jonathan's part of the work, one sentence; Zijiang to confirm the wording above]
Abstract [preprint link, with Prof. Zhao's OK]
A financial-literacy app that teaches by playing, built with a team of fellow students at Penn's Glassman Penn Scholars Program and entered in the Congressional App Challenge. [needs: his role on the team, two screenshots or a one-minute demo, links]
A randomized block experiment comparing ways of propagating hoya cuttings, designed and run at home, with the rooted plants donated to Heroic Gardens. [needs: the treatments compared, the outcome measured, the result; photos]
A way to set a financial plan for a particular person rather than for an average one: ask what confidence they need, then plan at the matching percentile of the return distribution. The median, not the mean, is the floor a rational plan should start from. The curve at the top of this page is the picture of that idea. [needs: a short write-up with real numbers]
[needs: a sentence from Jonathan on what he plays and writes]
[needs: category and year; the piece as a PDF, if the competition's rules allow posting it]
[email address]
Germantown Friends School, class of 2027