Ashwika Agrawal

Ashwika Agrawal is an accomplished biomedical researcher and science-fair mentor who earned a 1st Place Grand Award at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in Biomedical and Health Sciences, one of the highest honors available in high-school science research. Her award-winning project developed a low-cost computer-aided lung auscultation system combined with machine learning to automatically diagnose respiratory illnesses, bringing together biomedical engineering, healthcare, data science, and artificial intelligence.

Her experience gives her a particularly strong perspective on biomedical, healthcare, and computationally driven science-fair projects. Ashwika has firsthand experience taking a project from identifying a meaningful real-world problem through designing a technical solution, developing the underlying methodology, analyzing data, and ultimately presenting the work to highly accomplished ISEF judges. Her project used respiratory sound data and a custom Python-based data-processing pipeline alongside a machine-learning approach, giving her experience at the intersection of biology, medicine, machine learning, and experimental research.

As a mentor, Ashwika focuses on helping students turn broad interests in medicine and biology into specific, competition-ready research questions. She can help students evaluate potential research directions, develop stronger hypotheses, choose appropriate methodologies, design computational or experimental approaches, analyze results, and clearly communicate the significance of their findings.

Her firsthand experience at the highest level of science-fair competition also allows her to help students prepare for the strategy and presentation side of ISEF, including developing a clear research narrative, explaining technical concepts to judges with different backgrounds, anticipating difficult questions, and identifying the aspects of a project that are most important to emphasize during judging.