Davido Zhang ‘25 Places at Regeneron

By KEVIN THANT, MELIA THIBAULT, ARJUN VELAN,  and MEGHAN TATE ZEE

The Regeneron Science Talent Search is America’s oldest and most prestigious science competition for high school students. With 13 Nobel prizes in the alumni, students compete for over $3.1 million in research grants. Last year, Achyuta Rajaram ’24, Alan Bu ’24, and Riya Tyagi ’24 all placed and won awards in this prestigious competition. This year, senior Davido Zhang was named a finalist. 

Zhang is a four-year senior in Wentworth Hall and plans to attend Stanford University. He first stumbled upon his topic of research, optimal transportation, at a summer program at MIT. “I was exposed to a pretty wide range of wide range of resources, and professors that are very in-depth in the area that I was researching,” Zhang shared

Optimal transportation is “a pretty nice area of theoretical math that has been recently applied to a lot of areas in machine learning and also economic models” he further explained. 

Zhang had an MIT graduate student as a research mentor and his research project culminated in the form of a 20-page paper, following a presentation at MIT for the summer program. However, it didn’t end there. “I came to Exeter again for senior year and I was doing a lot of work on the third floor of the library actually because they have those few rooms that have those large whiteboard spaces.” Zhang shared, “So I bought my markers and I asked some of my friends just to take those rooms before they got occupied. And then I would be helping my friends with their math while I do my research.”

Zhang’s advice is to “not do a project just to win this prize. Start by just finding a specific area that you’re very interested in and then professors near you.”

Zhang stated, “I like this project a lot because of how widely applied it is. Since I’m also majoring in applied math, I realized that a lot of this boils down to not just coming out with proofs.”