Who
Eligible high school seniors with original, individual research and a contribution they can defend without a teammate.
Counselor intelligence brief
Regeneron Science Talent Search
A practical planning guide for turning serious high-school research into a Regeneron STS submission: eligibility, strategy, timeline, and the kind of project architecture that can credibly compete.
Snapshot date May 21, 2026. Society for Science says the 2027 application opens June 1, 2026 and closes in early November 2026.
Decision brief
Regeneron STS in five answers
What
A full application centered on a student-written research report of up to 20 pages, plus essays, recommendations, transcripts, and documentation.
When
Build from late spring through October. Confirm the exact early-November close and submission time on the active cycle page.
How
Audit eligibility, individual ownership, and approvals first. Then build a defensible claim, reproducible analysis, honest limitations, and a specific recommendation packet.
Why
Each cycle names 300 scholars and 40 finalists, with more than $1.8 million in awards and national recognition for scientific promise.
1. What Regeneron STS is
Regeneron STS is the United States' oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high-school seniors. It is run by Society for Science and sponsored by Regeneron, with 300 scholars, 40 finalists, and more than $1.8 million in awards each cycle.
The core product is not a poster. It is a full application built around an original, independent research report, essays, recommendations, transcripts, and evidence that the student has unusual scientific promise. Treat it like a research thesis plus a leadership file.
Applicants
2,600+
2026 was the largest applicant pool since 1967.
Scholars
300
Each scholar and school received a $2,000 award in 2026.
Finalists
40
Finalists compete in March for top national awards.
2. Eligibility and cycle timing
The first screen is procedural. If the student or project fails here, stronger science will not rescue the application.
A strong STS candidate usually has
- Original research conducted during high school.
- A clear individual contribution that can be defended without a teammate.
- A mentor who advises without becoming a hidden co-author.
- Enough time to write, revise, document approvals, and collect recommendations.
The common disqualifiers
- Team research presented as individual work.
- Missing pre-approval or documentation for regulated research areas.
- Student is not in the eligible senior-year category.
- Late application, late recommendation, or unresolved application issue after the support window closes.
2027 cycle planning dates
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Application opens
June 1, 2026
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Application closes
Early November 2026
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Customer support cutoff
24 hours before deadline
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Scholars named
January 2027 expected
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Finalists named
Late January 2027 expected
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Finalist week
March 2027 expected
3. The project that can compete
Regeneron rewards more than technical polish. The entry needs a scientific claim, a believable method, and visible student judgment.
What judges are scoring
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Originality
A real question, not a packaged demonstration or polished class project.
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Scientific rigor
A research report that can survive Ph.D.-level review, including limitations.
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Independence
The idea, execution, analysis, and writing must be the student's own work.
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Leadership promise
Essays and recommendations need to show the student behind the science.
How to shape the research
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Anchor the question
Start with a mechanism or phenomenon the student found, then make the model serve that discovery.
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Beat a baseline
STS readers need to know what changed because of the student's work. A credible benchmark is cleaner than a dramatic adjective.
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Show the student's judgment
A strong entry explains why tempting alternatives were rejected, not just what finally worked.
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Keep the paper defensible
Every figure should connect to the central claim, with no cosmetic charts padding the report.
Client strategy pattern
Discovery first, model second
For an Avery-style climate project, the clean STS arc is: build or discover a novel regime, show why existing models miss it, then design a predictive model that uses the discovery and beats a published baseline in the regime where the old approach fails.
1. Novel artifact
Catalogue, dataset, proof, sensor, assay, or pipeline.
2. Mechanism
What the artifact reveals that was not visible before.
3. Benchmark
A fair baseline that makes improvement measurable.
4. Interpretation
Why the result happened and when it does not generalize.
4. Winners to study
Recent winners are useful because they show the range of projects STS will reward. The lesson is not to copy a field, but to study the shape of the contribution.
2026 top three
Noble polyhedra, retina-based AI screening, and clam cancer models
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1st place
Connor Hill
Completed a computational and proof-driven classification of noble polyhedra, expanding the known set of highly symmetric shapes.
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2nd place
Edward Kang
Built RetinaMind, an AI and cell-model approach to screening for neurodevelopmental disorders from retinal signals.
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3rd place
Iris Shen
Tested whether clams with naturally occurring blood cancer can serve as a practical model for leukemia drug discovery.
Counselor read: The top three are wildly different fields, but each has a crisp artifact: a complete classification, a working screening model, or a new organism model.
2025 top three
Infrared astronomy, rare-disease treatment, and hypergraph math
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1st place
Matteo Paz
Used waveform-based machine learning on nearly 200 terabytes of WISE telescope data to identify infrared variable objects.
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2nd place
Ava Grace Cummings
Created a fruit-fly model of STAC3 disorder and tested candidate treatments tied to a rare muscular condition.
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3rd place
Owen Jianwen Zhang
Solved a theoretical combinatorics problem involving 3-uniform hypergraphs.
Counselor read: A winning STS project can be computational, experimental, or theoretical. The constant is original work with a concrete contribution.
2024 top three
AI interpretability, cancer metabolism, and mathematical optimization
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1st place
Achyuta Rajaram
Improved automatic discovery of visual circuits inside machine-learning models, making image classifiers more interpretable.
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2nd place
Thomas Cong
Studied how metabolism and gene expression interact in immune cancers, challenging a simple gene-expression-only view.
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3rd place
Michelle Wei
Advanced second-order cone programming solvers, a mathematical optimization tool used in many applied systems.
Counselor read: Top projects often make a hard system more legible: an AI model, a cancer pathway, or a solver that underlies real optimization problems.
5. Roadmap to submission
Work backward from early November. The submission month is for writing and quality control, not discovering whether the experiment works.
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May to June
Lock mentor boundaries, confirm individual ownership, audit prior research, and define the claim that would be worth a 20-page report.
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June to July
Rebuild data and baselines, create reproducible notebooks, and write a short methods memo before adding complexity.
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July to August
Run the main experiment, ablations, and negative controls. Freeze a versioned analysis pipeline.
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September
Turn results into figures, compare against credible baselines, and collect enough failure cases to make the discussion honest.
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October
Draft the research report, essays, and recommendation packet. Submit support tickets before the 24-hour support guarantee window.
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Early November
Submit the full application and recommendations before the 8pm ET deadline once the 2027 exact date is posted.
6. Readiness check
Use this as the first advising screen before committing a student to the STS sprint.
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Eligible senior
Last year of secondary school in the U.S. or territories, or a U.S. citizen abroad.
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Individual research
No team project split apart for STS, even if roles were different.
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Original report
Maximum 20-page scientific paper, written by the student, with appropriate citations and documentation.
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Documentation clean
Human subjects, animals, tissues, cell lines, pathogens, and hazardous agents need rules review before submission.
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Recommendation plan
Teachers and mentors need deadlines, project context, and enough lead time to write specifically.
If time is tight
Cut scope before cutting rigor. A smaller claim with clean evidence beats a sprawling project with soft controls.
If the mentor is strong
Define advisory boundaries in writing. STS wants independence, not invisible lab authorship.
If the result is negative
A negative result can still work if the question mattered, the test was fair, and the explanation is scientifically useful.
7. Official resources
Keep these links close. The 2027 official rules are expected in June 2026, so the site should be refreshed after Society for Science posts the new packet.