UPDATE: Dec. 8, 2015

This morning, the Siemens Foundation announced the winners of this year’s Siemens Competition via live stream, and teammates David Zhu and Evani Radiya-Dixit were named $20,000 scholarship winners! Congratulations!

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This past weekend at the California Institute of Technology, juniors Evani Radiya-Dixit and David Zhu were named the winning team at the regional finals of this year’s Siemens Competition. Their project, titled “Automated Classification of Benign and Malignant Proliferative Breast Cancer Lesions,” earned them a shared $6,000 scholarship and a trip to the National Finals in Washington, D.C., which will take place Dec. 4-8.

Radiya-Dixit and Zhu received high praise from judges at the competition, including Alexandre Cunhe, director of CalTech’s Center for Advanced Methods in Biological Image Analysis, who said, “In this ‘big data’ era, with a larger data set, David and Evani’s approach has the potential of being very applicable to help distinguish a breast cancer tumor as benign or malignant. This could lead radiologists to be able to better diagnose biopsy images.”

The two students were later mentioned in a San Jose Mercury News story about the competition, in which five South Bay high school students are finalists.

Congratulations to these hard-working students, and good luck in the nation’s capital!