St. Mary’s Dominican High School senior Lourdes Maristany was awarded 1st Place in Louisiana State University’s 2026 High School Summer Research (HSSR) poster competition. The HSSR program gives high school students the opportunity to experience research in a university setting and work directly with LSU faculty and graduate students. Their summer is spent learning how to approach a problem as researchers, developing their products, keeping research notes, communicating their findings, and learning how to present their work to an academic audience.  

​Lourdes worked on the project with Assistant Professor Dr. Mahmood Jasim at LSU’s Computer Science Department. She spent countless hours working on the research project, “MediaPipe-Based Hand Detection Using Coordinate Landmarks and Machine Learning for American Sign Language Translation.” Lourdes presented her research to a panel of LSU College of Engineering faculty and engineering graduate students who evaluated projects and presentations.

Raynesha Ducksworth, Recruiting and Outreach Assistant Manager, LSU College of Engineering, shared, “Lourdes was thoughtful about her work, eager to learn, and consistently willing to put in the time needed to move the research forward. She regularly participated in our workshops focused on research and lab preparation, and she took every opportunity to strengthen her presentation and communication skills. Lourdes is a bright young woman with an exceptional mind, but what stood out to us just as much was her dedication, curiosity, and willingness to learn. She was a wonderful representative of St. Mary’s Dominican High School, and we were genuinely happy to have her as part of our program this summer.”