2006 Intel Science Talent Search Winners
First Place: $100,000 scholarship, Shannon Lisa Babb, 18, of Highland, Utah, for an environmental science project identifying the human impact to water quality along the Spanish Fork River and its tributaries.
Second Place: $75,000 scholarship, Yi Sun, 17, of San Jose, California, for a project in mathematics that involves the winding number of a function, which, in the case of the plane, is the number of times it encircles the origin.
Third Place: $50,000 scholarship, Yuan Zhang, 17, of Derwood, Maryland for a project in medicine and health. She studied the molecular mechanisms behind atherosclerosis, or arterial plaque buildup, a disease in which lipid-laden macrophages - fat-filled white blood cells - build up in the vessel wall.
Fourth Place: $25,000 scholarship, Nicholas Michael Wage, 17, of Appleton, Wisconsin for a project in mathematics in which he studied generalized Paley graphs.
Fifth Place: $25,000 scholarship, Jerrold Alexander Lieblich, 17, of East Setauket, New York, for a cognitive psychology study built around an audio-visual illusion called the McGurk effect.
Sixth Place: $25,000 scholarship, David Bruce Kelley, 18, of Highland, New York, for a particle physics research project concerning low-energy neutrino detection in liquid neon. David's project explored the brief delay, called trapping time, that electrons experience when they move through the liquid-vapor boundary in cryogenic liquids.
Seventh Place: $20,000 scholarship, Myers Abraham Davis, 17, of Baltimore, Maryland for a computer sciences project that addressed collision detection for physical simulation applications in high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs).
Eighth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Adam Ross Solomon, 16, of Bellmore, New York, for a space science project on brown dwarfs - one of the busiest new fields in astronomy. Adam's project established a new methodology for determining the age and mass of brown dwarfs.
Ninth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Evan Scott Gawlik, 17, of Pinehurst, North Carolina, for a project involving the noble gases krypton and argon and the organo-compounds they make with fluorine and chlorine. Evan used a quantum mechanics approach and computational programs to project the existence and stability of six potentially new halogen-containing organo-noble gas compounds.
Tenth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Kimberly Megan Scott, 17, of Wellesley, Massachusetts, for a project that combined algebra and logic in which she analyzed Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games, named after the two logicians on whose work these games are based.
Fact Monster/Information Please® Database, © 2007 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
