A Laboratory Grows Young Scientists

A Laboratory Grows Young Scientists

Photographs By Soo-Jeong Kang/The New York Times

For three young finalists in the Intel Science Talent Search, there were some big questions that needed answering before the end of high school.

By ETHAN HAUSER

Published: March 11, 2013

OSSINING, N.Y. — During lunch hour, the hallways of Ossining High School have a kind of barely contained chaos. Whistles bleed from the gym, students squeeze every last minute of freedom before they’re due back in class. Even the library, where Dan McQuaid sat with two of his science teachers two weeks ago, buzzes and hums.

None of this hubbub drew even the tiniest acknowledgment from these three. Instead they were there to talk about Dan’s cancer research.

A 17-year-old senior, Dan is one of 40 finalists in the nationwide Intel Science Talent Search. The winner will be announced Tuesday night in Washington, and when a reporter asked Dan about the pressure, one of his teachers, Angelo Piccirillo, stepped in protectively.

Dan, he said, has already earned distinction enough: He is the first student from Ossining High ever to reach the finals. “It’s all gravy from now on,” Mr. Piccirillo added with a smile.

That kind of gentle encouragement undoubtedly helped Dan advance to where he is. Yet this has hardly been a stress-free week for the Intel finalists, shortlisted from a group of 300 semifinalists. They have been in Washington since Wednesday and Thursday to present their projects to a judging panel and the public. The top 10 finalists will receive prizes of $20,000 to $100,000; the other 30 will receive $7,500.

And that may just be the beginning. If history is any indication, several of these young men and women will go on to greater fame: Since the science competition’s inception in 1942, as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, seven of its alumni have won Nobel Prizes and 11 have received MacArthur “genius” awards.

The 40 finalists were culled from more than 1,700 applications, which are due in November. (The 2012 deadline was just days after Hurricane Sandy paralyzed much of the East Coast, and students affected by the storm got an extension.)

The competition is run by the Society for Science and the Public and is financed by the Intel Corporation, through its Intel Foundation. When Westinghouse ceased sponsorship 15 years ago, Intel took over, primarily “to change the conversation about young scientists in the U.S.,” said Wendy Hawkins, the foundation’s executive director.

Instead of the “endless drivel” about stereotypes of scientists as geeks and absent-minded professors, Ms. Hawkins added, “we want to focus on celebrating and supporting the life-changing work these young scientists are doing and will do throughout their careers.”

One of Intel’s first changes was to significantly increase the prize money. “Money does attract attention,” Ms. Hawkins said. “We want students like these to be just as celebrated as are the star athletes and entertainers in their schools.”

In Washington, finalists are judged by scientists from universities across the country (this reporter’s late father was a judge), whose knowledge outside their fields is sometimes outstripped by many of the finalists.

What the judges are looking for, however, is not limited to a project itself.

“Our goal is to find future leaders in science,” said the panel’s chairman, David Marker, a professor of mathematics, statistics and computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In four 15-minute interviews with groups of three judges, finalists are not only asked about their projects but are also tested on basic science knowledge. For example, Dr. Marker said, they might be asked to “diagram a plant cell and explain the functions of some of the organelles.”

And then there are the questions that no one can prepare for: “One of my favorites from a former judge was ‘Tell me about the universe,’ ” Dr. Marker said. “Another might ask them to predict the future of the newspaper industry.” The idea is to get “some indication of how they think.”

Tuesday night’s announcement will close this particular chapter of these students’ lives, but this is a story with much to come. Here are four of the finalists and their projects.

Car Keys and Secure Keys

In many ways Mayuri Sridhar is like any other 17-year-old. One morning in late February, with patches of snow from the recent storm still dotting her hometown of Kings Park, N.Y., on Long Island, she was fretting over her driving test. “I’m worried about parallel parking,” she said.

But in other ways, she could hardly be more different. In her bag, she carries a SecurID device, which allows her to connect her laptop with Kraken, a supercomputer at the University of Tennessee that can run millions of simulations.

Working at the lab at Stony Brook University, under the mentorship of Dr. Carlos Simmerling, a chemistry professor, Mayuri looked at a protein that plays an important role in tumor suppression. (The precise title of her project is “Computational Analysis of the DNA-Binding Mechanism of the p53 Tumor Suppressor and Its Inactivation Through the R249S Mutation.” See: not your typical teenager.)

KLF6, a protein, acts as a tumor suppressor in a lot of cancers, he said, yet “there’s so little of it.” Wanting to know why, he joined a lab at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, where graduate students and faculty members were working on identifying the factors behind the protein’s degradation. Part of what the research program teaches students, Ms. Holmes said, is tenacity; Dan and his advisers approached 30 to 40 potential mentors before finding one who would take him on.

Asked what he was looking forward to most about heading to Washington, Dan blurted out, “Meeting Obama.” (Intel finalists often get an audience with the president.) When Ms. Holmes offered that, depending on world events, he might have to settle for the vice president, he allowed that that would be all right, too.

Making an Impact

Many Intel finalists log long hours in sophisticated labs attached to universities and research centers where they must wade gingerly so as not to upset fragile experiments (and egos). Others, like Catherine Wong, 17, of Morristown, N.J., spend a lot of time in their schools’ modest classrooms and at home, where she “got to break a lot of stuff.” From those missteps emerged a prototype for a wireless device that can produce a digitized electrocardiograph and transmit the results from remote locations to doctors via cellphone.

Catherine, who goes to Morristown High School, became interested in telemedicine after viewing the exhibit “Design for the Other 90 Percent” at the Cooper-Hewitt museum in Manhattan, which highlighted devices aimed at helping people in the developing world. There are far more cellphones than toilets in third-world countries, she points out.

From there she taught herself cellphone software coding and electrical engineering techniques, using “breadboards” and a soldering iron. “Engineering is the field that worships impact,” she said of her choice to enter it, “and to have the greatest impact, it has to be in the developing world.”

Catherine is something of an outlier among this year’s Intel semifinalists and finalists: 82 percent of the engineering projects were submitted by boys. (Conversely, plant science skews overwhelmingly female — 80 percent.)

The larger picture is good news for anyone worried about gender equality in the sciences. In 8 of the last 10 years, 40 percent to 50 percent of finalists were girls.

Catherine has applied for a provisional patent for her prototype. Not that she will be doing much sitting around and waiting: she is currently teaching herself about retinal photography, another area that has potential impact in the developing world because such imaging can also be used telemedically to help diagnose diabetes.

“Inspiring” is a word often used about the Intel Science Talent Search. Dr. Andrew Yeager, a professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, who retired as judging chairman last year, said that it “was one of the most inspiring and rewarding activities in which I have been involved.” The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote in 2010 that attending the awards dinner “was the most inspiring evening” he had had in Washington in 20 years.

But even those who don’t come to know these young men and women through their ravenous intellects, or find in their ethnic diversity overwhelming evidence of the upsides of open-immigration policies, are often moved by their stories. Samantha Garvey, a semifinalist last year from Long Island, was living in a homeless shelter when she learned of her honor.

And one of this year’s finalists, Lane Gunderman, a student at the University of Chicago Lab School, said his interest in photosynthesis developed “as my science courses explained its importance in the grand scheme of life.” He knows something about life’s grand schemes: just six years ago he and his family were temporarily homeless as well.

Last week, he boarded a plane for the first time ever. On Tuesday, he will join the other finalists at a gala at the National Building Museum There they will discover something not even those with the gaudiest test scores and the most restive minds could tell you: what happens next.