2014-01-22

Forty high-school seniors from across the United States were announced today as finalists in the country’s oldest and most prestigious pre-college science competition, the Intel Science Talent Search (STS), a program of Society for Science & the Public.

The Intel STS encourages students to help solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. Entrants are judged on the originality and creativity of their scientific research projects as well as their achievement and leadership both inside and outside the classroom. Finalists’ research spans from a mathematical model that can replicate cardiac arrhythmias to a fast-charging, low-cost energy-storage supercapacitor to innovative stem-cell research.

The 40 finalists will convene in Washington, D.C. from March 6 through 12 to compete for $630,000 in prize money provided by the Intel Foundation, including a grand prize of $100,000 that will be awarded to the first-place winner.

The 2014 Intel STS finalists are from 33 schools in 14 states. Finalist projects are distributed among 15 categories, including behavioral science, biochemistry, bioengineering, bioinformatics, chemistry, computer science, earth science, engineering, environmental science, materials science, mathematics, medicine,  microbiology, physics, and space science.

These 40 finalists were narrowed down from nearly 1,800 entrants and 300 semifinalists:

Alec Vadim Arshavsky

East Chapel Hill High School, Chapel Hill, NC
Automatic Characterization of Donor Tissue for Corneal Transplantation Surgery

Kathy Camenzind

California High School, San Ramon, CA
Quantifying Trapping Forces in a Simplified Optical Tweezers Setup

Eric S. Chen

Canyon Crest Academy, San Diego, CA
Computer-aided Discovery of Novel Influenza Endonuclease Inhibitors to Combat Flu Pandemic

Steven Chen

Westwood High School, Austin, TX
On the Surface Tension of Entropic Droplets in Dynamically Metastable Liquids

John Anthony Clarke

Regis High School, New York, NY
High-Energy X-ray Emission in the Jovian Magnetosphere: A Feasibility Study for the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR)

Aron Coraor

Huntington High School, Huntington, NY
Pressure Dependent Azeotropic Melting Relations in the Mg2SiO4-Fe2SiO4-NaAlSi3O8-CaAl2Si2O8 System: a Critical Role in Lunar Highlands Formation?

Soham Daga

Stuyvesant High School, New York, NY
Using Google Trends to Enhance Predictive Models of Mortgage Delinquency to Mitigate Risk in the Loan Lending Process

Shaun Datta

Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Spring, MD
Saturated Nuclear Matter in the Large Nc and Heavy Quark Limits of Quantum Chromodynamics

Neil Davey

Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Spring, MD
Early Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment Through the Detection of Circulating Tumor Cells Using Drop-Based Microfluidics

Benjamin Freed

Governor Thomas Johnson High School, Frederick, MD
Identification of Novel Regulatory Mechanisms of the K-Ras Oncoprotein

Anubhav Guha

Horace Greeley High School, Chappaqua, NY
Discovery of Rare Earth Oxide Nanoparticles as Agents for Prolonging Fluorescence Imaging in Biological and Other Systems: Fluorescence Studies from Single Molecules and Dispersions

Yushi Homma

Carmel High School, Carmel, IN
Asymptotics of Two-Point Correlation Functions for the Zeros of Random Polynomials

Preeti Kakani

Jericho Senior High School, Jericho, NY
Differential Gene Expression Prior to Eye Opening in Mouse Superior Colliculus

Joyce Blossom Kang

Brentwood High School, Brentwood, TN
Development of a High-performance Hybrid Supercapacitor on CF Cloth Using 3D Nano-Architectured Electrodes Comprised of Aligned CNTs Coated with Pseudocapacitive MnO2 Nanoparticles

Angela Xiangyue Kong

Lynbrook High School, San Jose, CA
The Transcription Factor Bcl11b Regulates Mammary Stem Cell Self-Renewal and Quiescence Partially Through Cell Cycle Progression Inhibitor CDKN1a/p21

William Henry Kuszmaul

Lexington High School, Lexington, MA
A New Approach to Enumerating Statistics Modulo n

Kevin Lee

University High School, Irvine, CA
Strongly Coupled Electromechanical Modeling of the Heart in Moving Domains Using the Phase-Field Method

Charles Xin Liu

Henry M. Gunn High School, Palo Alto, CA
Integrated Meta-analysis of 64 Diseases Identifies Novel Relationship Between Systemic Sclerosis and Systemic Lupus erythematosus

Esha Maiti

California High School, San Ramon, CA
Stochastic Monte Carlo Simulations to Determine Breast Cancer Metastasis Rates and Tumor Distribution from Patient Survival Data

Rahul Siddharth Mehta

The University of Chicago Laboratory High School, Chicago, IL
A New Max-Flow Algorithm for Sparse Networks

Joshua Abraham Meier

Academy for the Advancement of Science and Technology, Hackensack, NJ
Control of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Aging by Modulation of Mitochondrial DNA Deletions

Anne Merrill

Greenwich High School, Greenwich, CT
Comparative Suppression of Soil-Borne Pathogens via Earthworm Bioturbation of Natural and Man-Made Biochars

Lisa P. Michaels

Plano West Senior High School, Plano, TX
Pan-Neuronal Over-Expression of the GCLc Gene to Mitigate Redox Stress and Mitochondrial ETC Complex  Dysfunction in Alzheimer’s Disease

Sreyas Misra

The Harker School, San Jose, CA
Design and Characterization of a Novel Single-headed and Hand-held PET Camera Using 511 keV Photon Collimation via Compton Scatter

Viola Mocz

Mililani High School, Mililani, HI
The Mass Ratio of Elementary Particles from Helicotoroidal Topology

Natalie Ng

Monta Vista High School, Cupertino, CA
Advancing Precision Medicine: MicroRNA Prognostic Signatures and Prediction Models for Distant Metastasis Free Survival in Breast Cancer

Emily Pang

Dougherty Valley High School, San Ramon, CA
The Opposing Roles of Tumor Suppressive cC1qR and Oncoprotein gC1qR as Mechanisms for Inhibiting Cancer Pathogenesis

Jiho Park

University High School, Irvine, CA
Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Aromatase: Implications for Novel Drug Design

Ivan Spassimirov Paskov

Edgemont High School, Scarsdale, NY
Predicting Cancer Drug Response Using Nuclear Norm Multi-Task Learning

Brianna Pereira

Academy for Medical Science Technology, Hackensack, NJ
CXCR4/SDF-1α Signaling as a Target of Microenvironmental Regulation of Metastasis in NSCLC

Thabit Pulak

Richardson High School, Richardson, TX
Affordable Home-based Bio-sand Arsenic Water Filter and Rapid Arsenic Water Test Using Nanotechnology

Zarin Ibnat Rahman

Brookings High School, Brookings, SD
The At-Risk Maturing Brain: Effects of Stress Paradigms on Mood, Memory and Cognition in Adolescents and the Role of the Prefrontal Cortex

Ajay Saini

Acton-Boxborough Regional High School, Acton, MA
Predictive Modeling of Opinion and Connectivity Dynamics in Social Networks

Sara Sakowitz

The Brearley School, New York, NY
A Novel Approach for Metastatic Breast Cancer Therapy: Pharmacological Inhibition of EZH2 Histone Methyl Transferase Activity Suppresses Cancer Stem Cells and Induces Epithelial Phenotype

David Seong

Lexington High School, Lexington, MA
Novel Use of Mutant Huntingtin Haplotype 3′UTR Sequence to Discover miRNAs Targeting Mutant Huntingtin Gene Causing Huntington’s Disease

Vishnu Shankar

Monta Vista High School, Cupertino, CA
The 3D Structure of Human DP Prostaglandin G-protein Coupled Receptor Bound to Selective Antagonists from GEnSeMBLE Predictions

Jessica Shi

Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Spring, MD
The Speeds of Families of Intersection Graphs

Kaitlyn Shin

Jericho Senior High School, Jericho, NY
Photon and Positron Emission from Primordial Black Hole Clusters

Anand Srinivasan

Roswell High School, Roswell, GA
RNNScan: Eukaryotic Gene Prediction via Recurrent Neural Networks Utilizing Local-Feature Extraction

Parth Thakker

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Durham, NC
Design, Assembly, and Optimization of Novel ZnxSeAgy Biocompatible Quantum Dot Sensitized Solar Cells

Society for Science & the Public, a nonprofit membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education, has owned and administered the Science Talent Search since its inception in 1942.

The post 40 U.S. High School Seniors Named Intel STS Finalists appeared first on Cogito.

Show more