VOORHEESVILLE — An 18-year-old Voorheesville high school student has won an award at a research conference for his study of cancer cells.

Ryan Burczak is a senior at Clayton A. Bouton High School. His research project, “Potential Role of BTK-52 in Aggressive Breast Cancer,” won in the high school division of cell biology and biochemistry at the Sigma Xi Student Research Conference in Atlanta.

“I really feel honored,” said Burczak. “I put a lot of time and effort into this and it really paid off.”

Sigma Xi is an international honor society for science and engineering. Its November research conference brought together high school students, undergraduate college students, and graduate students who presented their projects and attended lectures.

Winners received a medal, 130 dollars, and nominations to join Sigma Xi with their first year of membership dues waived.

Burczak’s interest in cancer cell-research began shortly after studying biology in his freshman year of high school. That following summer, in 2014, he attended a program for high school students at the University at Albany’s Gen*NY*Sis Center for Excellence in Cancer Genomics. His interest was so great that the following winter he approached Dr. Douglas Conklin, a scientist at the center, about working there. Conklin agreed on the condition that Burczak conduct experiments there in order to come up with a hypothesis to work towards.

Burczak performed experiments at the university laboratory but also did extensive computer research. Biomedical research, he explained, is not as lab-based as it once was.

“A lot of it required the use of a computer, and the use of many databases,” he said. “It’s not just all lab experiments.”

Burczak, who intends to major in computer science in college, says about half the work he did was computer-based.

He eventually formed a hypothesis that a specific cell-signaling-complex in leukemia also causes breast and prostate cancers to become metastatic, a term for cancer spreading to distant parts of the body to form new tumors.

His hypothesis and the research spanning over two years were presented at two other conferences before the one this past November, the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Science Research Conference at Stanford University earlier in November, and the American Junior Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, in February.

“For every conference, I built on the work I had,” said Burczak. “So it wasn’t the exact same thing. I just had more progress.”

The conference saw about 115 students’ projects scored by judges.

“I like the opportunity to see other students’ research,” said Burczak. He also enjoyed attending lectures at the conference.

Now that he has returned home from Atlanta, Burczak can focus on other things he enjoys: composing electronic music on his computer and playing the French horn in the Empire State Youth Orchestra, in which he will be performing at Proctor’s Melodies of Christmas.