Washington D.C., Dec. 5, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Research projects on robot navigation and on a tumor-suppressing protein today earned four remarkable students entrée into the prestigious $100,000 winners' circle of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, the nation's premier research competition for high school students. The students join a highly selective group of just 13 individual competitors and 13 teams who have previously been awarded Grand Prizes in the Siemens Competition.
See content from Siemens Foundation and Synaptic Digital: http://inr.synapticdigital.com/siemens/Competition2012
Kensen Shi, a senior at A&M Consolidated High School in
College Station, Texas, won the $100,000 Grand Prize in the
Individual category for developing a new method to improve robot
motion planning. Jeremy Appelbaum, William Gil and Allen Shin,
seniors at George W. Hewlett High School in Hewlett, New York, will
share the $100,000 Grand Prize in the Team category for
investigating COP1, a key protein in plants and animals.
The Siemens Competition is a signature program of the Siemens
Foundation, a leading supporter of science, technology, engineering
and mathematics (STEM) education in the United States. The
Competition is administered by the College Board. The fourteenth
annual awards were presented this morning at The George Washington
University, host of the 2012 Siemens Competition National
Finals.
The Winning Individual
Kensen Shi won a $100,000 college scholarship for his project, Lazy
Toggle PRM: A Single-Query Approach to Motion Planning.
The Winning Team
Jeremy Appelbaum, William Gil and Allen Shin will share a $100,000
college scholarship for their project, COP1 Arrests
Photomorphogenesis in Dark Grown Gametophytes of Ceratopteris
richardii; A Study of COP1 in Cryptogams.
National Finalists
Six individuals and six teams competed at the Siemens Competition
National Finals. The remaining National Finalists were awarded the
following scholarships:
Individuals
• $50,000 scholarship - Jiayi Peng, Horace Greeley High School,
Chappaqua, New York (Physics)
• $40,000 scholarship - Samuel Pritt, Home School, Walkersville,
Maryland (Computer Science)
• $30,000 scholarship - Saumil Bandyopadhyay, Maggie L. Walker
Governor's School for Government and International Studies,
Richmond, Virginia (Electrical Engineering)
• $20,000 scholarship - James Howe, Regina High School, Iowa City,
Iowa (Biology)
• $10,000 scholarship - Raghav Tripathi, Westview High School,
Portland, Oregon (Biochemistry)
Teams
• $50,000 scholarship - Daniel Fu, Park Tudor School, Indianapolis,
Indiana, and Patrick Tan, Carmel High School, Carmel, Indiana
(Mathematics)
• $40,000 scholarship - Neil Davey, Montgomery Blair High School,
Silver Spring, Maryland, and Katie Barufka, Langley High School,
McLean, Virginia (Microbiology)
• $30,000 scholarship - AJ Toth and Jim Andress, Oak Ridge High
School, Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Computer Science)
• $20,000 scholarship - Jonathan Tidor and Rohil Prasad, Lexington
High School, Lexington, Massachusetts (Mathematics)
• $10,000 scholarship - Thomas Luh, Leland High School, San Jose,
California, and Joy Jin, Henry M. Gunn High School, Palo Alto,
California (Biology)