Indian students win six awards at Intel competition in US

Indian students have won six awards at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in the US where New Delhi’s Shreyas Kapur was declared the grand winner of the “Google Thinking Big Award.” Organised by Intel Corporation and the Society for Science and the Public in Arizona this month, the Indian team comprising 16 students won a total of $9,500 in three grand awards and three special awards in the fields of biotechnology, medicine, biomedical engineering and mathematics, Intel declared in a statement on Tuesday. Kapur from Modern School at Barakhamba Road won the award for the “project that addresses a large and seemingly-impossible problem, by finding an elegant solution with broad impact”. His project titled “Cellphone-based Optometry using Hybrid Images” also won him third position in both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Biomedical Engineering award. Arvind Krishna Ranganathan from Ecole Mondiale World School in Mumbai won the second place for his project titled “Deterministic Approach to the Position, Trajectory, and Collision Prediction of Particles within Bounded Two-Dimensional Environments”. Suhani Sachin Jain and Divya Kranthi of Centre Point School in Nagpur won the third award in plant sciences for developing an “Innovative Strategy using Endophytes for Effective Biocontrol of Insect Pests in Cotton”. Vasudev Malyan of Maharaja Agarsain Public School in Delhi won fourth spot in translational medical science for the development of a “Novel Paper Sensor as a Diagnostic Test for Multiple Sclerosis”. The 16 Indian students were selected to attend ISEF as finalists of the Initiative for Research and Innovation in Science (IRIS) 2016 that featured more than 1,700 young scientists selected from 419 affiliate fairs in 77 countries. The Intel Foundation also awarded $1,000 grant to each winner’s school and to the affiliated fair they represented. IANS