Four seniors named Intel Science Talent Search semifinalists

Intel+Science+Talent+Search+%28STS%29+semifinalists+Vineet+Kosaraju+%2812%29%2C+Sophia+Luo+%2812%29%2C+Sadhika+Malladi+%2812%29%2C+and+Jonathan+Ma+%2812%29+pose+for+a+picture.+Each+year%2C+Intel+STS+names+300+high+school+seniors+nationwide+as+semifinalists%2C+and+offers+each+a+%241%2C000+award%2C+along+with+%241%2C000+to+their+school.

Jonathan Dai

Intel Science Talent Search (STS) semifinalists Vineet Kosaraju (12), Sophia Luo (12), Sadhika Malladi (12), and Jonathan Ma (12) pose for a picture. Each year, Intel STS names 300 high school seniors nationwide as semifinalists, and offers each a $1,000 award, along with $1,000 to their school.

by Sahana Srinivasan and Tiffany Wong

The Intel Science Talent Search (Intel STS) announced seniors Vineet Kosaraju, Sophia Luo, Jonathan Ma and Sadhika Malladi as semifinalists in the 2016 competition today morning.

Each semifinalist receives a $1,000 award and wins $1,000 for their school. This year, 1,750 students applied from 512 different high schools in 43 states.

Sadhika, whose project was titled “Application of EMDomics to Identify Age-associated Expression and Treatments in Cancer,” decided to explore algorithms used to identify genes and how certain genetic patterns can be indicative of a person’s reaction to various medical treatments.

“I had experience with this class of algorithms – algorithms used to identify differentially expressed genes – through previous work, and I knew that creating an improved algorithm that did this would have big implications for the translational power of computational results,” she said.

Jonathan’s project involved using a machine-learning algorithm to predict the drug responses of cancerous cells. He has participated in science research since the eighth grade.

“Before, when I was starting out, I had to learn a lot of things from scratch,” he said. “Although my last year’s project and this year’s project are obviously different in methods, different in approach, I would say my experience doing research last year and in previous years has really helped me pursue this year’s research more successfully.”

The Society for Science and the Public (SSP) hosts STS, which Intel has been sponsoring for the past 18 years. Intel will end sponsorship of STS after 2017, but SSP will continue to run the competition.

Last year, Intel STS named 15 Harker students as semifinalists and three as national finalists. Andrew Jin (‘15) won a first place prize in the “Global Good” category for a project on evolutionary genetics in relation to genetic mutations. In the 10 years that Harker has participated in STS, 66 students have been named semifinalists and nine have been announced as finalists.

40 of the 300 semifinalists will become national finalists and will receive a free trip to Washington D.C. to compete for final awards and prizes. First place prizes are separated into three different categories, Basic Research, Global Good and Innovation, each of which gives the winning student $150,000. Second place winners receive $75,000 each and third place winners $35,000.

Intel STS will announce the 40 national finalists on Jan. 20.