[Updated] Eleven Intel Semifinalists: Most in California, Second in the U.S.

January 15, 2012:
Several news outlets have published or broacast stories on the 29 Bay Area Intel Science Talent Search semi-finalists:

The UC Santa Cruz Astronomy and Astrophysics web page has a story noting four semi-finalists, including three Harker students worked on their projects while part of the UC Santa Cruz Science Internship Program.

KQED radio covered the Intel Science Talent Search in its morning news briefs, mentioning that a new record for Bay Area semifinalists was set this year, with 29 students selected.

Harker’s upper school student publication, Winged Post, posted a story, photos and video on the award assembly at Harker;

Harker students were quoted in an article in the San Jose Mercury News

KTSF TV’s 7 p.m. news Jan. 11, featured an article on a number of the semi-finalists.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel published a story about the 29 Bay Area Semifinalists,

ABC7 broadcast a feature on the topic, including coverage of the Bellarmine winners

The World Journal Chinese language ePaper published a story on Jan. 15

STNN.CC a global Chinese news portal and subsidiary of Sing Tao News Group also ran a story on the semifinalists. (http://oversea.stnn.cc/SF/201201/t20120113_1691724.html)

January 11, 2012:
For the second year in a row, Harker broke the record for Intel Science Talent Search semifinalists in California, when 11 students, all of them in grade 12, were named at a morning assembly on Jan. 11. Prag Batra, Lucy Cheng, Nicole Dalal, Govinda Dasu, Michelle Deng, Vishesh Gupta, Revanth Kosaraju, Ramya Rangan, Pavitra Rengarajan, Kathryn Siegel and Albert Wu all received a $1,000 prize for the projects they submitted to the contest. This year’s competition had 1,839 entrants from nearly 500 high schools in 44 states, the District of Columbia and overseas. Of those, 300 students were selected as semifinalists. Only one school had more semifinalists than Harker in the entire country.

Last year, Harker broke the record for California with seven semifinalists, two of whom, Nikhil Parthasarathy ’11 and Rohan Mahajan ’11, were named finalists, making Harker the only school in the nation to produce two Intel finalists.

On Jan. 25, 40 finalists will be chosen to go to Washington, D.C. in March to compete for more than $1.25 million in awards from the Intel Foundation.

The students’ projects are as follows:

“Donor and Epitope Specific Variations in Immune Gene Expression in CMV Dextramer Positive CD8 T Cells,” by Nicole Dalal

“De Novo Splice From Discovery from RNA-Seq Data,” by Ramya Rangan

“Detailed Chemical Abundance Patterns of Andromeda Dwarf Satellites from Cadded Spectra,” by Lucy Cheng

“An Ontological Bayesian Framework for Context-Specific Navigation and Discovery of Biomedical Knowledge,” by Michelle Deng

“Determining the Genetic Target of Drugs Using a Synthetic Lethality Map,” by Kathryn Siegel

“Neuroanatomical and Cell Population Abnormalities Found in Mouse Model for Human Chromosome,” by Pavitra Rengaragan

“Role of Epidermal Hif-1 ALPHA in the Inflammatory and Angiogenic Response to Ischemia in Diabetic Wound Healing,” by Revanth Kosaraju

“Storage of Active Biological Compounds in Silk Films,” by Prag Batra

“Discovery of 16 Nearby Brown Dwarf Candidates in WISE Preliminary Release Data,” by Govinda Dasu

“Multi-net Bayesian Networks for Integrative Genomic Discovery: Application to the Epistatic Interactions for HIV,” by Albert Wu

“Use of Discretization Approach in Autonomous Control of an Active Extrados/Intrados Camber Morphing Wing,” by Vishesh Gupta