A San Diego high school senior is a finalist in the prestigious Regeneron Science Talent Search competition for her research on how astronauts’ wounds might be able to heal. Leanne Fan, 18, a 12th-grader at Westview High School, built a device that uses rotation to simulate microgravity — the ne ar-weightlessness that astronauts experience in space — in order to study how live organisms grow in space. Some people use such a device, known as a clinostat, to study how plants might grow in the absence of gravity. But Fan is using it to study how human and worm cells react. “NASA’s version is around $50,000 commercially, but I looked at the way they built it and the way that it works with the mechanism, and I tried to replicate it with this,” she said. Fan’s planarian worms, purchased online, react like they’re in constant free-fall when placed inside the device. Over time, the worms are being rotated by the clinostat, so their cells’ sensors can’t catch up. Astronauts’ wounds don’t heal in orbit the same way they do on earth, which can be dangerous given the limited availability of medical care. So Fan is testing photobiomodulation — “a very specific kind of red light therapy” — to accelerate the rate of healing, something she said hasn’t previously been tested. Leanne Fan is a finalist in the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2026 contest. She’ll head to Washington in March to compete. (Howard Lipin / For The San Diego Union-Tribune) She has done this in two ways: decapitating worms to see how fast they grow their heads back, and measuring how fast human cells migrate to close a mock wound. She’s using the clinostat to simulate microgravity, “because I can’t send all my samples to space.” In her experiments with photobiomodulation, Fan was able to get the worms’ heads to grow back 40% faster in normal gravity and nearly twice as quickly in simulated microgravity. She accelerated the rate of cell migration in human cells to close a mock wound by 30%. Fan had researched the effects of light on cells before. During the COVID-19, she researched how blue light kills bacteria, building a blue-light box to disinfect groceries. Soon she got curious about the effects of light on the other end of the spectrum, including devices like the red-light therapy face mask her mom used. So she created a slide presentation filled with a list of materials she needed and interesting articles, before landing on her project. David MacMartin, a Westview science teacher who taught her honors and Advanced Placement biology, said most of Fan’s skills with the work were self-taught. “When it came to the main aspects of the project, she came up with that on her own,” he said. He helped her with the “soft skills” of interacting and how to get a point across. But because she is a student member of the Poway Unified school board and editor of her school newspaper, she already knew how to do that. She’s also encouraging other students, MacMartin added. “She’s bringing up her peers along with herself,” he said. In the two years since Fan first embarked on her project sophomore year, she’s hit a lot of dead ends. First she tried to find a lab to conduct the work in, so that she could use human cells. “I had to email so many labs,” she said. That didn’t work out. So she moved on to Plan B: worms. Because she was starting the work at home, her best alternatives to human cells were planarians, freshwater worms that can regenerate any body part. “I bought 200, and I had to overcome my fear of worms first of all. They’re so nasty,” she said. Soon she was cooking food for her worms more often than for herself, mostly things like egg yolks. She started with liver, but that got “really tedious, really fast.” The worms had to be photographed daily, which took two to three hours. And because she hadn’t realized at first that she’d need to normalize the worms’ sizes, two months of work went down the drain. “That’s really sad, but it’s part of the process,” she said.  Leanne Fan, photographed at Westview High on Jan. 29, 2026, faced some trial and error in her early efforts to create a clinostat to help simulate microgravity conditions. (Howard Lipin / For The San Diego Union-Tribune) That wasn’t the only trial and error. The first version of the clinostat used rotating phone stands duct-taped together, but they couldn’t hold much weight. For the second version, Fan went dumpster diving and found scraps at furniture stores, motors on eBay and bookends from the dollar store that were the perfect height. Scrap wood from home — from chairs, she thinks — made it into that version, too. Then it needed decoration — a sticker of Mars and enamel pins. “I need to jazz it up,” she said. The need reflects her artsy side, she acknowledged. Fan is interested in both science and the humanities, and she wants to double major in college, then ultimately pursue both a medical degree and an academic doctoral degree. She chalks up the project to her past as an “art kid.” “I never would have come up with the idea of using light to heal wounds or to help with ear infections if I didn’t try to see things in different, unique ways,” she said. Jeff Wenger, her English teacher and newspaper adviser, credited his student with being willing to take a risk, and comfortable with wondering and not having answers. Lots of teens think deeply about issues, he said. “But Leanne thinks about it and says, ‘Oh, I’m going to try and do something about it,’” he added. For now, Fan is preparing to head to Washington next month for the Regeneron contest. She’s one of 40 finalists chosen from more than 2,600 total entrants.  From March 5-11, the finalists will compete, meet scientists and share their research with the public. Each finalist gets $25,000, but the grand prize is $250,000 to further scientific education. Winning that kind of money would help Fan feel more comfortable with going the M.D.-Ph.D route, which would otherwise mean taking on a lot of student debt. But if she had $250,000 to spend on anything, she says she’d want to create a mock space mission or test her light research in low-earth orbit. But with human cells this time — not worms. ...read more read less