2008 Intel Science Talent Search Winners
First Place: $100,000 scholarship, Shivani Sud, 17, of Durham, North Carolina for a bioinformatics and genomics project that focused on identifying stage II colon cancer patients at high risk for recurrence and the best therapeutic agents for treating their tumors.
Second Place: $75,000 scholarship, Graham William Wakefield Van Schaik, 17, of Columbia, South Carolina, for a two-year study of the long-term effects of exposure to pyrethroids, commonly found in household and agricultural pesticides.
Third Place: $50,000 scholarship, Brian Davis McCarthy, 18, of Hillsboro, Oregon, for his research on developing new types of solar cells. Brian synthesized extremely thin and fragile films and verified his results using scanning electron microscopy techniques.
Fourth Place: $25,000 scholarship, Katherine Rose Banks, 17, of Brooklyn, New York, for a project on problems in combinatorial geometry. Katie gave a proof of a conjecture of S. Rabinowitz, that a convex lattice polygon with nine vertices cannot have exactly eight or nine interior lattice points.
Fifth Place: $25,000 scholarship, Eric Nelson Delgado, 18, of Bayonne, New Jersey, for studying the use of novel efflux pump inhibitors (EPI) to improve the efficacy of antibiotics against multidrug resistant bacteria.
Sixth Place: $25,000 scholarship, David Alex Rosengarten, 18, of Great Neck, New York, for a physics project in which he studied dark matter and the controversial galactic rotational curves. David's results showed that Einstein's General Relativity Theory, in principle, could modify rotation curves without including dark matter.
Seventh Place: $20,000 scholarship, Xiaomeng Zeng, 18, of Iowa City, Iowa used Iowa public library statistics and U.S. census datasets to study the long-standing debate of whether public library funding from either government or private sources might adversely affect funding from the other group.
Eighth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Philip Mocz, 18, of Mililani, Hawaii, for developing a novel statistical algorithm and using it to discover previously unidentified patterns in the distribution of nearby stars.
Ninth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Alexis Marie Mychajliw, 16, of Port Washington, New York, combined her interests in animal behavior and environmental science for a project that tracked Odonate (dragon flies and damsel flies) family populations. She collected data to discover the nature of population distribution and its application to conservation policy.
Tenth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Evan Neal Mirts, 18, of Jefferson City, Missouri, observed changes in volume and surface area of spinach chloroplasts using a scanning ion conductance microscope (SICM).
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