Palo Alto Teen in Running for $100K Scholarship

A student from Palo Alto has made it to the finals of the Intel Science Talent Search. Sahana Vasudevan put together a project titled “Minimizing the Number of Carries in the Set of Coset Representatives of a Normal Subgroup” for the prestigious competition.

The Intel STS lists Sahana’s school as the Gnyanam Academy. (Patch has been unable to find a listing for the school. If you have any information about the Academy, tell us in comments.)

The 40 finalists will travel is Washington, D.C. in March where they’ll compete for prizes. The top award is a $100,000 scholarship.

“This year’s Intel Science Talent Search finalists are presenting a wide range of research, from optimizing algae oil for biofuel to developing a new treatment for blood cancer,” said Wendy Hawkins, executive director of the Intel Foundation. “It’s exciting for the future of innovation because the U.S. needs these 40 high school seniors, and others like them, to question, explore and help solve some of the world’s greatest challenges.”

An equal number of boys and girls were selected as finalists. More than 30 percent of the finalists are from California and New York. More than 1,700 students entered the competition.  The complete list of finalists is online. The finalists were announced Wednesday.

Past Intel competitors have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes, two Fields Medals, five National Medals of Science, 11 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships and, on an unrelated note, an Academy Award for Best Actress.

Five students from Palo Alto were semi-finalists. Here’s the complete list:

Castilleja School

Victoria Lee Dean, 18
Automated Search for Lyman-Alpha Emitters in the DEEP3 Galaxy Redshift Survey

Gnyanam Academy

Sahana Vasudevan, 15
Minimizing the Number of Carries in the Set of Coset Representatives of a Normal Subgroup

Henry M. Gunn High School

Helen Jiang, 17
Asymmetrical and Heterogeneous Single-Particle Volume Reconstruction of the Transcription Pre-Initiation Complex using a Novel Non-Reference Based Pipeline

Laura Hsia Tung, 17
Synthesis of Novel Phosphonium-Based Ionic Liquids and Analysis of Their Properties

George Yu 17
Feasibility of Single-Molecule Imaging with a Free Electron Laser Optimized via Genetic Algorithm

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