Wicked Local An invisible virus changed life for everyone at Billerica High School this year. A barely visible fly changed Ogechukwu Iwuchukwu's life for the better. A proposal Iwuchukwu, 16 wrote, using common fruit flies to study genetics, earned her a first-place award at the Massachusetts Science & Engineering Fair (MSEF) for a project proposal in the behavioral sciences category. Iwuchukwu's proposal: The Intergenerational Impact of Parent Stress Using Drosophila Melanogaster, common fruit flies. Her project will explore how past trauma imprints on DNA - leaving an epigenetic scar. She will use fruit flies, a common scientific tool, because you can study multiple generations quickly because of the short life span.