By TAPinto Chatham Staff

Published May 24, 2026 at 12:14 AM

CHATHAM, NJ – Chatham High students Ranvir Iyengar and Kelly Nie each won awards at New Jersey STEM competitions and Aanya Aditya presented her research project at the first New Jersey Science Research Symposium.

Iyengar was awarded second place in the Biostatistics category at the Terra North Jersey STEM Fair held at Kean University; Nie won second place in the Math and Computer Science category at the NJ Academy of Science gathering, which was also held at Kean University.

Aditya presented her research project at the research symposium held at Millburn High.

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“My research focused on implementing novel statistics-driven algorithms that would assist in the enhancement of CT-scans, making the results comparable to that of an MRI in delineating tumors of the liver," Iyengar said.

"This is important because MRIs are a much more precise and accurate method of delineation, but it is also much more expensive and time-consuming, having negative effects on patients.”

Iyengar, a junior at CHS, was mentored by Dr. Edward Dee, resident physician in radiation oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

“I created an AI-powered system, RallyCoach, that analyzes tennis match footage and generates personalized, data-driven feedback to help players improve," Nie said.

"I used computer vision and large language models to extract data from the videos, and used that data to give playing recommendations. My mentor's name is Abhinav Agarwal. I had a lot of fun building my project, and learned more about the capabilities and applications of AI to make an impact on my community.”

Mentor Agarwal is the Chief Technology Officer at Clair, a healthcare technology company.

“My research project, SortSmart, is an AI-based app available on the Apple App Store (if you search for smartsort_AI, it should come up!) that classifies waste into the categories of plastic, metal, glass, cardboard, and non-recyclable materials using computer vision," Aditya said of her presentation. "Essentially, you can upload or take a photo of a recyclable item, and the app identifies what kind of recyclable item it is.

“I trained the model on a curated dataset with image preprocessing and augmentation, and it achieved a relatively strong accuracy (of around 80% on average). The goal of this project is to reduce contamination in recycling systems by helping users correctly sort waste at the point of disposal. My motivation for this stemmed from the fact that I noticed that many people are not very aware of the proper way to recycle, which is a major reason recyclable materials still end up in landfills.”

Aditya was mentored by Dr. Yelena Naumova, science teacher at CHS, and her mother, Swati Mehrotra, who holds a PhD in Education.