Honoring the next generation of American innovators, Intel Corporation has announced the winners of the Intel Science Talent Search. Shivani Sud, 17, of Durham, N.C., won the top award, a $100,000 scholarship from the Intel Foundation. For her research project, Sud developed a model that analyzed the specific "molecular signatures" of tumors from patients with stage II colon cancer. She then used this information to identify those at higher risk for tumor recurrence and propose potentially effective drugs for treatment.
Also achieving top placement in the competition were:
Second Place: Graham Van Schaik, 17, of Columbia, S.C., received a $75,000 scholarship for his 2-year project studying the effects of pyrethroids, a common type of pesticide, on breast cancer and nerve cell degeneration.
Third Place: Brian McCarthy, 18, of Hillsboro, Ore., received a $50,000 scholarship for developing new types of solar cells in order to provide a less expensive, renewable form of energy.
Fourth Place: Katherine Banks, 17, of Brooklyn, N.Y., received a $25,000 scholarship for her geometric analysis of the number of lattice points inside polygons with nine sides.
Fifth Place: Eric Delgado, 18, of Bayonne, N.J., received a $25,000 scholarship for discovering a new way to improve the efficacy of antibiotics against multidrug-resistant bacteria.
Sixth Place: David Rosengarten, 18, of Great Neck, N.Y., received a $25,000 scholarship for his physics research showing that Einstein's General Relativity Theory, in principle, could modify rotation curves in the absence of dark matter.
Seventh Place: Xiaomeng (Jessica) Zeng, 18, of Iowa City, Iowa, received a $20,000 scholarship for her social sciences project in which she found a positive relation between government and private funding of public libraries – as one increases, so does the other.
Eighth Place: Philip Mocz, 18, of Mililani, Hawaii, received a $20,000 scholarship for designing and using a statistical algorithm to discover hidden patterns of nearby stars.
Ninth Place: Alexis Mychajliw, 16, of Port Washington, N.Y., received a $20,000 scholarship for her project studying the importance of both wetlands and meadows as habitats for dragonflies and damselflies.
Tenth Place: Evan Mirts, 18, of Jefferson City, Mo., received a $20,000 scholarship for using a scanning ion conductance microscope (SICM) to observe the changes in size and shape of spinach chloroplasts over a period of time without destroying the sample.
The remaining 30 finalists received $5,000 scholarships and a new laptop featuring the Intel® Core™2 Duo processor.
This year's Intel Science Talent Search finalists hailed from 19 states and represented 35 high schools throughout the United States. Of the more than 1,600 high school seniors who entered the 2008 Intel Science Talent Search, 300 were announced as semifinalists in January. Of those, 40 were chosen as finalists and invited to Washington, D.C., to compete for the top 10 awards.
To learn more about Intel's commitment to education around the world, visit www.intel.com/education. To learn more about Society for Science & the Public, visit www.societyforscience.org.