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Eric Sawyer, 18, a senior at Central High School, is the youngest member of a team of students that competed in The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGem) competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Math and science students from Central High School and Missouri Western State University have once again achieved success at an international science symposium.

The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGem) competition held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tripled in size since Western students first competed in 2006. They competed against 110 other schools, including graduate students from Ivy League universities, from Oct. 31 to Nov. 2.

The team, which included Central High School student Eric Sawyer, Western students Bryce Szczepanik, Clifton Davis, Siya Sun, Ashley Schnoor and William Vernon, received a gold medal in information processing.

The team also includes students from Davidson College in North Carolina. They attempted to “advance the field of bacterial computing” using the E. coli bacteria in a project called a satisfiability (SAT) logic problem. The project’s name gave students an idea for their team name — The Rolling Clones. Their team T-shirt sports their name and the phrase — “Can’t get no SATisfaction.”

Dr. Todd Eckdahl, professor of biology, and Dr. Jeff Poet, associate professor of mathematics, led the team at MIT again this year. Dr. Eckdahl said 47 of the 110 teams received gold medals in various categories and that the competition gets tougher every year.

Dr. Eckdahl said he believed that Missouri Western was the only primarily undergraduate institution to be awarded a gold medal.

“This is the best project we’ve done yet,” said Dr. Eckdahl, who along with Dr. Poet, guided a team to publish papers in previous projects that got significant attention in scientific periodicals. “We now know that we can take this project to point of publication.”

Eric Sawyer, the youngest member of his team and son of News-Press General Manager Lee Sawyer, is a senior at Central. He spent five days a week over the summer working on the project. Despite being one of the youngest students in the competition, the aspiring biologist never felt intimidated. Rather, he was intrigued to learn more about the field of synthetic biology and see what similar research outcomes have been accomplished by other teams.

“I really felt like I was part of the whole experience,” he said.

Eric and the rest of the team will continue to work on the project through the school year.

Jimmy Myers can be reached at jimmym@npgco.com.