Homelss Intel semi-finalist

xiggi
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 23:52:57 +0000

This is what is wrong with how Setauket’s Ward Melville and Stony Brook compete:

[The New York Times > Education > On Education: Want to Be an Intel Finalist? You Need the Right Mentor](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/09/education/09education.html)



High school students cannot do research at this level without adult mentors - often a university professor plus a team of grad students - to pick a topic that will break new ground, yet be manageable, and to supervise them at every step.

Aditi Ramakrishnan, a semifinalist who researched toxicity of nanoparticles in cosmetics, says she would have no project if it were not for the daily help she received from a team of nearby Stony Brook professors. “I’m only 17,” she said. “I didn’t have the background to create the experiment. I didn’t know how to use the equipment. I couldn’t create the hypothesis.” Aditi spent last summer at a Stony Brook lab, sometimes pulling all-nighters. Professor Rafailovich gave her the topic - to examine whether tiny particles in cosmetics, nanoparticles, could damage skin cells. “Aditi walked into a project where a million dollars had been spent to get to that point,” said Professor Rafailovich.

Yuan Sun, a doctoral candidate, made the nanoparticles that Aditi studied. Dr. Nadine Pernodet was in charge of cell cultures and the state-of-the-art sanitizing air hood that grew skin cells for Aditi. “I saw Nadine every single day for many hours,” said Aditi. “I could not have done it without Nadine.” For Aditi to see the damage the nanoparticles did in a cell she had to be trained on a half-million-dollar confocal microscope that sees three dimensions.

To determine whether nanoparticles did similar damage in human fagocyte cells required Aditi to work with bacteria, something she could not legally do because of her age. So Dr. Celine Pujol did it. “Aditi decided how many nanoparticles to add, what concentrations and the protocol,” said Dr. Rafailovich. “But Dr. Pujol did the hands-on work.”

Martin Rocek, a Stony Brook physics professor, picked a math project for Neal Wadhwa of Ward Melville. “It happened there was a new development in the field that was not exceedingly technical,” says Professor Rocek, who gave Neal private geometry tutorials and suggested several calculations to work out. Those calculations broke new ground in the supermanifold field, but Neal says that at first, he didn’t grasp what his answers meant. “Professor Rocek told me the significance of what I’d found,” he said. “I didn’t know.”