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A Texas teen has won the prestigious Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award for inventing a device that can quickly shut down undersea oil spills. Karan Jerath, 18, received 50,000 in scholarship funds for his ground-breaking project at the Intel International Science and Engineering fair held May 15 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Nicole Sabina Ticea, 16, of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, also received the award for developing a low-cost, easy-to-use testing device to diagnose HIV infections in low-resource communities. The top prize, the $75,000 Gordon E. Moore Award, went to Raymond Wang, 17, of Canada, for his research on curbing disease transmission in an aircraft cabin by adjusting airflow.
Jerath won the award for designing a sturdy device that can collect the oil, gas and water spewing from a broken well on the seafloor. His work was inspired when the Deepwater Horizon well spilled millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico five years ago because a cofferdam (a containment enclosure) deployed to the site failed to stop the leak. Jerath developed a better cofferdam that separates natural gas, oil, and ocean water, plus accommodates different water depths, pipe sizes, and fluid compositions. His design also allows for the injection of warm nitrogen to prevent the formation of methane hydrate, which can clog a system. Through simulations, Jerath demonstrated that his cofferdam has the potential to function at undersea depths where oil is currently being produced, a description of his project on the Intel website says.
Jerath was also one of the five students selected for the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum Visit to India Award. Selected students will go on a week-long trip to India to showcase their research projects, visit research leading institutions and interact with top scientists.
About 1,700 students who participated at the IISEF in Pittsburgh were the top performers at 422 affiliated fairs held in 75 countries. At the IISEF their projects went through rigorous evaluations by about 1,000 judges with PhDs or equivalent qualifications from across scientific disciplines.
Seventeen students from India were selected for the IISEF from the National Science Fair held by Initiative for Research and Innovation in Science. Onkar Singh Gujral, 18, of La Martiniere for Boys in Kolkata, won the Association of Computing Machinery first award and the second award in the System software category for his entry on image processing algorithms for detecting nanomaterials. Other Indian winners include Mansi Aggarwal, 17, and Harshit Jindal, 14, of Maharaja Agarsain Public School, Delhi (Fourth Award in Plant Sciences category for research on “An Effective Herbal Ointment against Enterobiasis”); Ravi Pradip, 17, of Dayapuram Residential School, Kozhikode, Kerala (Third Place in Material Sciences for work on “Plumeria Blooms for Organic Electronics”); Arsh Shah Dilbagi, 17, of DAV Public School, Panipat, Haryana (Third Award in Embedded Systems category for developing “TALK-An AAC Device: Converting Breath into Speech for the Disabled”); Mansi Aggarwal, 17, and Harshit Jindal, 14, of Maharaja Agarsain Public School, Delhi (Fourth Award in Plant Sciences category for research on “An Effective Herbal Ointment against Enterobiasis”); and Aditya Bhargava, 16, and Komal S., 16, of Sharada Vidyanikethana Public School, Mangalore, Karnataka (Fourth Award in Material Sciences for work on “Highly Sensitive Nano-Ferrite for Detection of Carbon Monoxide in Air”).
The Augusta, Georgia-based Ashtavadhani Vidwan Ambati Subbaraya Chetty Foundation, an educational and medical service foundation dedicated to recognizing academic talent and providing services to the needy, also presented 10 awards at the fair. Sanjana J. Rane, 17, of Louisville, Kentucky, received the first award of $1,000 for work relating to renal fibrosis from the based in Georgia. Five Indian-American students who received the foundation’s second awards of $500 each were Naveena Bontha (Development of Novel Process for Large-Scale Fabrication of High Surface Area MOF (Metal Organic Framework) Membranes for CO2 and H2 Capture ); Swetha Revanur (Enabling Precision Medicine with Big Data: A Cross-Platform Framework to Computationally Characterize Gene Presence and Function); Vikas Rammohan Maturi (Engineered Intraocular Injection Guide (IIG): Pain Reduction in Ophthalmic Disease Treatment); and Swapnil Pande (Mathematical Modeling and Simulation of Cardiac Tissue Electrophysiology: Effect of Cardiac Deformation on Action Potential Duration).
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