As the only participant from Clark Magnet High School, sophomore Bhavin Shah found it essential to impress everyone at a recent science fair hosted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and sponsored by Los Angeles County Office of Education and several major companies, including SpaceX, Northrop Grumman and Edison International.

The fair took place in La Cañada Flintridge on April 14. Fifty-seven students participated in the fair and got the chance to chat and get advice from many scientists and staffers.

“I’m really grateful for such an opportunity,” Shah said. “Not everyone gets to spend time with genius scientists and share their ideas with them.” The students, representing 30 different schools from LA County, experienced behind the scenes of various technological advances and learned how they actually work.

Shah’s project was about cloud security. He hypothesized a compromise of the cloud’s authentication mechanism security. After a few tests, Shah was successfully able to steal the usernames and passwords of a cloud administrator. “My judges advised me to look into the security of programming languages such as Java, and how vulnerabilities in these languages might cause problems in the cloud,” Shah said.

The first, second and third placed teams in every category received an award. He won an Inspiring Excellence Award worth $50.

“It was pretty awesome meeting professionals and talking about my field with them,” Shah said. This wasn’t Shah’s first science fair, and it definitely won’t be the last. He says that more people should be interested in the science and math world and sign up for all the fascinating events.