Intel Corporation and the Society for Science & the Public awarded the top 10 college scholarship awards for the Intel Science Talent Search at a banquet in Washington, DC on Tuesday.
The first prize of $100,000 was awarded to Indian-American student Shivani Sud, 17, of Durham, North Carolina.
Sud had submitted a bioinformatics and genomics project to the Intel Science Talent Search that focused on identifying stage II colon cancer patients at high risk for recurrence and the best therapeutic agents for treating their tumors.
The standard method of characterising tumors relies on visual information, including size, degree of metastasis and microscopic structure.
Sud's 50-gene model for predicting the recurrence of colon cancer instead uses gene expression profiles to link multiple genetic events that characterise various tumor types.
She created her model using two public data sets containing 125 patient samples and coupled it with clinical data to plot statistically significant survival curves.
She then used her model to identify drugs that may be effective in treating stage II colon cancer.
Sud is first in her class of 358 at Charles E Jordan High School and represents the students at school board meetings.
She is a Teen Court student attorney, a Durham Rescue Mission volunteer and performs classical and modern Indian dance. Sud plans to attend Princeton or Harvard, earn an MD/PhD and have a career in research.
The second prize of $75,000 was awarded to Graham William Wakefield Van Schaik of South Carolina who completed a two-year study of the long-term effects of exposure to pyrethroids, commonly found in household and agricultural pesticides, for his project in environmental science.
Ten prizes were given in all. From third place to tenth, the winners included Brian Davis McCarthy, Katherine Rose Banks, Eric Nelson Delgado, David Alex Rosengarten, Xiaomeng Zeng, Philip Mocz, Alexis Marie Mychajliw and Evan Neal Mirts respectively.