In mid-May, junior Allison Jia was named one of two winners of the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair! Jia’s project, which studied proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases, won her a $50,000 prize! It also was named Best in Category for cell and molecular biology and won a First Award, earning Jia an additional $5,000 and $1,000, respectively.
Senior Ruhi Sayana also did well at the fair, winning a $10,000 scholarship from the Drug, Chemical & Associated Technologies Association for her project in the biomedical and health sciences category, in which she also won a $1,000 Third Award from Intel ISEF and a $500 Second Award from the Ashtavadhani Vidwan Ambati Subbaraya Chetty Foundation. In the computational biology and informatics category, junior Cynthia Chen received a Third Award of $1,000. All three students won trips to the Intel ISEF at the Synopsys Silicon Valley Science & Technology Championship in March.
Jia’s efforts were writtten up in several publications:
At this year’s Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), held May 14-18 in Pittsburgh, juniors Anjay Saklecha and Krish Kapadia were grand award winners, receiving a fourth place award of $500 for their project, “UCH-L1 and s100B in Saliva as Novel Biomarkers for Severe Traumatic Brain Injury,” in the translational medical science category. The pair also won first place and $750 from the Air Force Research Laboratory. Also successful was junior Cameron Jones, who received a fourth place award in the physics and astronomy category for his project, titled “Automated Identification and Inference of Organic Molecular Structure and Relative Concentrations from Infrared Spectral Data.”
The students qualified for Intel ISEF after receiving grand prizes at the 2018 Synopsys Science & Technology Championship in March. About 1,800 high school students from around the world showcase their research each year at the event, which is the world’s largest science fair for pre-college students, millions of whom participate in local science fairs to earn a chance to appear at Intel ISEF.