Senior Sreyas Misra’s very first research project spent him hours hunched over a laptop or in a lab. After months of work, it would take him as far as the nation’s capital.

As an Intel Science Talent Search finalist, Sreyas presented his work with other student researchers from March 6 to 12 at Washington, D.C. After setting up his poster, he spent the first couple days sightseeing and touring the capitol and had the opportunity to meet with President Barack Obama. The following days consisted of presenting his poster to judges and to the public at various science fairs.

The judge’s questions stood out the most for Sreyas. The questions he received covered topics ranging from potato cells to insulin dosages for diabetic patients undergoing brain surgery.

“They try and see how you think because you’re not expected to know the answer directly. It’s more like you have to go through multiple logical steps before you can arrive at the solution,” he said. “It’s basically trying to see if you can do the scientific method in real-life situations.”

His experiences with other finalists and with judges sparked his interest in a broader range of topics.

“Every time I finished the interview, I would go up to my room on my computer and start looking up all the answers for the questions I just had,” he said. “I would read about random science topics on stuff like semiconductors and things like that just so I could be well-versed in a lot of the recent developments in science.”

His project focused on using alternative imaging techniques to reduce the size of positron emission tomography (PET) scanners, which physicians use to monitor and diagnose diseases like cancer. The currently room-sized equipment poses a significant cost. By designing a hand-held device that can achieve the same function, Sreyas hopes to allow hospitals more access to medical imaging.

“When you make technology a lot smaller, you start to change how it’s used in the hospital. For example, you can’t bring a room-sized PET scanner into the OR, but you can bring a hand-held scanner into the surgery room to aid the surgeon,” he said.

One of the challenges Sreyas faced during his project involved applying the programming he had learned from school to practical uses.

“A lot of these real-world constraints on programming that I never really had in the classroom started to become an issue in the lab, so that was a big learning experience for me,” he said.

Sreyas began his research during the summer before junior year and conducted the majority of his work in the summer before senior year. After spending between 400 and 500 hours in the lab, Sreyas continued research at home and during the school year.

“The day until I submitted my project, I was doing new research,” he said.

Through his research, Sreyas came to appreciate engineering and math on a greater level.

“I wish I took a lot more math courses in high school because what I started to realize in my project is that if you don’t have good math knowledge, it’s really hard to gain intuition to apply in engineering problems,” he said.

Sreyas plans to continue his research as an undergraduate at Stanford University. The next steps involve applying to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a grant to physically build the scanner.

“One big issue in my project was that I did not have that validation step of actually building my scanner to test my results in real life and see if my predicted results matched my actual results, and that’s what a lot of the other projects had.”

Sreyas hopes to pursue bioengineering for his undergraduate major and ultimately follow a career in medicine.

This article was originally published in the pages of the Winged Post on April 4, 2014.