North American Women Sweep Top Honors at Intel Competition

For the first time in the history of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, the top three award winners were women. Each of the three high-school students won an Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award at the fair, held last May in Cleveland, Ohio.

Elena Glassman from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Lisa Glukhovsky from New Milford, Connecticut, and Anila Madiraju from Montreal each won a $50 000 scholarship and a personal computer.

For her project, Glukhovsky, a junior, used simultaneous images of near-Earth objects (asteroids) from two observatory sites and a computer spreadsheet she created to determine the distance from Earth to asteroids. Her results closely agreed with NASA predictions.

Glassman, a junior, designed a computer science project that used electrical signals from the brain to detect whether a person intends to make a left-handed or right-handed movement. A potential application is to enable handicapped individuals to operate a computer. Madiraju, a senior, showed that a method involving the use of a type of RNA to target and kill cancerous cells is effective without the toxic side effects typically associated with anticancer drugs.

This year, students from 36 countries competed for $3 million in scholarships and awards. Next year’s competition will be held in Portland, Oregon, in May.