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Science News, March 14, 1998 by Susan Milius

What a birthday. On March 8, the day he turned 17, Christopher Mihelich of Carmel, Ind., learned he'd won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and a $40,000 college scholarship.

When the prize was announced, the other finalists and the audience at the awards ceremony at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.--a crowd with many distinguished scientists, including a Nobel laureate--burst out singing "Happy Birthday." Mihelich says the top honor surprised him; winners were announced starting with 10th place, and by fourth place he had given up hope. One of three mathematicians among the top 10 winners, he entered a paper proposing new methods for studying polynomial quotient rings.

Second prize, a $30,000 scholarship, went to Ravi Shah of Tempe, Ariz. He investigated repair genes from tumors that resist various cancer drugs. He had previously won honors in chemistry and math, and he placed first in his state, and third in the United States, in the National Spanish Exam.

Parker Conrad of New York took third place and a $20,000 scholarship. He compared the activities of two types of receptors in developing and mature nerve cells. In ninth grade, he started a computer consulting business, and he has understudied a role in a Broadway musical.

Fourth- through sixth-place winners received scholarships of $15,000 each.

Fourth-place winner Sohini Ramachandran of Fair Oaks, Calif., analyzed short sequences of DNA from American and Old World plant populations to determine whether the species could have spread with migrating humans. At 15, she was the youngest winner this year.

Travis Schedler of Carbondale, Ill., captured fifth place with his project on the quantum Yang-Baxter equation, which has implications for various fields of physics. His music inspires his mathematics, and he has performed in jazz choirs.

William Greenleaf of Rochester, Minn., the sixth-place winner, proposed changes in ultrasound methods of delivering DNA to cells for gene therapy. A paper on which he is first author has been accepted by a peer-reviewed journal.

Winners of seventh- through tenth-place awards received $10,000 scholarships.

Ann Kromsky of Corona, Calif., placed seventh with her investigation of how children learn language. Born in the former Soviet Union, she knows Russian, Ukrainian, and French and sings madrigals.

Eighth place went to Jonathan Kelner of Old Westbury, N.Y. He studied quark behavior using grids of random numbers. Kelner edits the school paper, plays varsity tennis, and founded a cancer fund-raising group.

Patrick Goodwill of Plano, Texas, placed ninth, A classical pianist as well as a chemist, he developed a silicon-diamond sensor he believes could dramatically cut costs of detecting contaminants in semiconductor processing.

Tenth-place winner Jesse Anttila-Hughes of New York used a mathematical model of the transmission of nerve impulses to simulate the disease myasthenia gravis. He has also won a scholarship to study in Japan.

Each of the remaining 30 finalists will receive a $1,000 scholarship.

Five finalists from earlier years have gone on to win Nobel prizes, said head judge J. Richard Gott of Princeton University, but only one of those laureates had made it into the top 10. Gott consoled the rest of this year's finalists by saying, "Statistically, this increases your chances of winning a Nobel prize."

The 1998 awards mark the end of 57 years of Westinghouse sponsorship. Science Service, which administers the Science Talent Search and publishes Science News, expects to announce the new sponsor later this month.