Winner will get $100,000 in prize money.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Eight of the finalists in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search competition are of Indian origin, and represent a full 20% of the total finalists up for the top prize.
The Indian finalists, and their respective projects, are:
- Vishnu Shankar – Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, California – “3D Structure of Human DP Prostaglandin G-protein Coupled Receptor Bound to Selective Antagonists from GEnSeMBLE Predictions”.
- Sreyas Misra – The Harker School in San Jose, California – “Design and Characterisation of a Novel Single-headed and Hand-held PET Camera Using 511 keV Photon Collimation via Compton Scatter”.
- Rahul Siddharth Mehta – The University of Chicago Laboratory High School in Chicago, Illinois – “A New Max-Flow Algorithm for Sparse Networks”.
- Anand Srinivasan – Roswell High School in Roswell, Georgia – “RNNScan: Eukaryotic Gene Prediction via Recurrent Neural Networks Utilising Local-Feature Extraction”.
- Ajay Saini – Acton-Boxborough Regional High School in Acton, Massachusetts – “Predictive Modeling of Opinion and Connectivity Dynamics in Social Networks”.
- Anubhav Guha – Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York – “Discovery of Rare Earth Oxide Nanoparticles as Agents for Prolonging Fluorescence Imaging in Biological and Other Systems: Fluorescence Studies from Single Molecules and Dispersions”.
- Preeti Kakani – Jericho Senior High School in Jericho, New York – “Differential Gene Expression Prior to Eye Opening in Mouse Superior Colliculus”.
- Parth Thakker – The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, North Carolina – “Design, Assembly, and Optimisation of Novel ZnxSeAgy Biocompatible Quantum Dot Sensitised Solar Cells”.
The eight desis are among 40 finalists, all of whom are high school students from across the US, and who were selected from among 1,800 initial applicants. That massive pool was eventually narrowed down to just 300 semifinalists, and now that number brought down to 40.
All of the finalists will meet up in here, in Washington, DC, from March 6-12, where they will go through a final round of judging before the winner is announced. That winner will receive $100,000 from the Intel Foundation. In total, $630,000 in prize money will be distributed to the winning projects’ creators.