CVU student earns spot in international STEM competition

Champlain Valley Union High School 11th grader Clay Nicholson has received top honors at the 2025 Vermont Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Fair, earning a May trip to an international gathering of the brightest young scientific minds.

With his project that utilizes computer learning to aid in the medical diagnosis of pancreatic tumors, Clay is the second CVU student in three years to earn such accolades. He developed his project as part of the school’s self-directed Nexus learning journey.

“This represents an incredible amount of work and an example of students using personalized learning programs to pursue deep dives in proficiency and direction,” Nexus program director Troy Paradee said.

Clay’s project, “The Development of a U-Net Model for Pancreatic Tumor Segmentation in Computed Tomography Scans,” stemmed from his summertime work with Hack Club, a Shelburne-based nonprofit organization for teens interested in coding.

“Hack Club has given me a whole lot of opportunities,” Clay says. “Every student there is super, super into computer science. It’s crazy that it just happens to be in Vermont.”

While developing a tutorial for machine learning with Hack Club last summer, Clay became interested in creating a model that could identify and classify tumors. After cold-calling numerous doctors to learn about the biomedical angle, he eventually connected with Dimitriy Akselrod, a radiology physician with University of Vermont Medical Center, who provided insights into professionally diagnosing and segmenting tumors.

“The computer science was the easy part for me,” Clay said, describing his project as a neural network, or machine-learning model, that segments CT scans for pancreatic tumors.

With his project in hand at March’s Vermont STEM Fair, Clay received the Yale Science and Engineering Association certificate for most outstanding individual 11th-grade project and a silver medal award in biomedical research. He was also one of nine gold medalists and earned the sole nomination to the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. At May’s ISEF gathering, Clay will join more than 1,800 students from 75 countries in Columbus, Ohio, for a week of competition, networking and learning.

Before the international science fair in May, Clay plans to improve his presentation and refine his machine-learning model. He’ll also fit in another international competition — this one in robotics, as co-captain of CVU’s RoboHawks.