Four Indian Americans, 1 Indian bag top prizes at Intel Science Fair

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NEW YORK

Four Indian Americans along with one Indian, out of the more than 1,700 students from around the world, won major awards at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles, on May 19.

The four Indian American winners were Pratik Naidu from Virginia, who won in the category of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics; Adam Nayak from Oregon, who won in the category of Earth and Environmental Sciences; Karthik Yegnesh from Pennsylvania, who won in Mathematics and Rahul Subramaniam from Connecticut, who won in the Microbiology category.

Prashant Ranganathan, a 12th grader from Jamshedpur, won the competition in the Environmental Engineering category for his project on biodegradation of pesticides.

“My project will actually help farmers in biodegrading the pesticide which is plaguing the country,” Prashant said, reported PTI.

One-fifth of the winners and those got recognitions were of Indian-origin, leading one of the Intel officials to conclude the event saying “Indians and Indian Americans rock today.”

“I think that many generations of Indian scientists and engineers and computer scientists have truly paved the way of this generation of young people doing extraordinary things,” said Maya Ajmera, president and CEO of Society for Science and Public.

Among projects, some stood out such as the one by Sairandi Sathyanarayanan and Sacheth Sathyanarayanan from the National Public School in Chennai, who invented a gearbox that lights up at night when a fisherman’s boat is at rest.

Other recognitions include: Shinjini Ghosh, a 12th grader from South Point High School in Kolkata, who developed a language recognition kit based on the variations in tone using the markov-chain model; Sahithi Pingali from Inventure Academy in Bangalore, who developed a new way to monitor lakes in developing countries and Kunj Siddharth Dedhia from the Dhirubhai Ambani International School in Mumbai, who created a smart phone application for cyclists based on user feedback, in order to reduce lower back pain.

First Award winners include: Shantanu Jakhete, Kashfia Rahman, Suraj Srinivasan, Arnob Das, Anushka Nair, Manashree Padiyath and Apoorv Khandelwal.

Second Award winners include: Suhani Jain, Divya Kranthi, Vishaal Balamurugan, Isani Singh, Chaianya, Marissa Sumathipala, Kshitij Sachan, Suganth Kannan, Archana Verma, Pranav Neyveli, Manan Shah, Mythri Ambatipudi, Neeraj Sakhrani, Sahithi Pingali, Siona Prasad, Syamantak Payra, Sachin Konan, Chaitanya Karamchedu, Suryaprakash Vengadesan, Vivek Gopalakrishnan, Stuti Garg, Sahil Hegde, Nikhil Cheerla, Anika Cheerla, Ritik Patnaik, Neil Deshmukh, Devina Thapa and Hemant Srivastava.

Those who won the Third Award prize were: J.J. Kapur, Sapna Patel, Sunjay Letchuman, Brindha Rathinasabapathi, Neil Khurana, Paritosh Suri, Soham Dessai, Surabhi Mundada, Vaishnavi Phadnis, Hari Sowrirajan, Anusha Zaman, Raul Vimal Kumar, Shrikant Chand, Sagar Maheshwari, Neha Hulkund, Aditya Jain, Meghana Bollimpalli, Arya Goutam, Malini Mukherji, Jaskaran Sethi, Aparimeya Taneja, Sairandri Sathyanarayanan, Aditi Bawa, Arjun Ramani, Pranav Chhaliyil, Arjun Jain, Rushabh Mehta, Sambuddha Chattopadhyay, Pranav Sriram, Jay Maturi, Abhinav Gundrala, Eshika Saxena, Shinjini Ghosh, Nikhil Gopal, Kavya Kopparapu and Neeyanth Kopparapu.

Fourth Award prize winners were: Aakash Arora, Nitya Parthasarathy, Pushkar Shinde, Sachin Jaishankar, Somil Jain, Vivek Kamarshi, Akshat Singh, Neha Seshadri, Arsh Banerjee, Rishik Reddy, Parth Saxena, Shiladitya Dutta, Meghana Iyer, Swathi Srinivasan, Aparna Paul, Kairav Kukkala, Padmavathi Reddy, Govind Krishna, Kunal Upadya, Suraj Modi, Shobhita Sundaram, Krishna Patel, Anjali Chadha, Aditi Kumar, Jay Chandra, Sai Sameer Pusapaty, Arundhati Pillai, Tanisha Martheswaran, Sachin Subramanian, Sathwik Karnik, Neehal Tumma, Sedra Khan, Kunj Dedhia, Shalin Shah, Divya Amirtharaj and Neelay Trivedi.