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Three students of Indian descent -- Narendra Tallapragada, Preya Shah -- were among the ten winners of the Intel Science Talent Search, America's oldest pre-college science competition.
Narendra Tallapragada, 17, of Burke, Virginia, who won the fourth place, received a $25,000 scholarship for his project to find ways to simplify complex models of atomic and molecular interactions. His goal is to one day create "mini-computers" that can be used, for instance, to create automatic insulin pumps inside diabetic patients or intelligent clothing that responds to temperature.
In the eighth place, Preya Shah, 17, of Setauket, New York, bagged a $20,000 scholarship for designing and synthesizing a tumor-targeting drug for cancer treatment that represents a new approach to delivery of chemotherapy agents and possibly treatment of multi-drug resistant cancer without causing significant side effects.
Nilesh Tripuraneni, 18, of Fresno, California, who was in the ninth place, received a $20,000 scholarship for formulating a set of hydrodynamic equations that may provide a potential method to better understand the first movements of the universe and could aid in the development of a quantum theory of gravity.
The remaining 30 finalists received $5,000 scholarships and a new laptop powered by an Intel Core2 Duo processor.