(Image source from: The American Bazaar)

Two Indian American students are among the top winners of the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors drawing exceptionally qualified entrants from across the country.

Adam Ardeishar, 17, of McLean, Virginia, secured third place in the rigorous competition and was awarded $150,000 for combining a mathematical dilemma known as the ‘coupon collector problem’ with extreme value theory to determine the likelihood of a maximal event.

Adam told American Bazaar: “The indicator is important for calculating a 1000-year flood or where you have a lot of market unrest and it can also be applied to an engineering process. If you are a plant manager and you want to build a schedule, you can know the average amount of time it takes to do it.”

Eshika Saxena, 17, of Bellevue, Washington, was awarded $40,000 for developing a system to screen for blood-related diseases using a smartphone. The gifted student, exemplifying girl power, has been accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she plans to major in electrical engineering and computer science.

About her project, Eshika told American Bazaar: “I turn the smartphone camera into a microscope so you can capture images of blood cells using just your smartphone camera and my attachment.

“I specifically focused on sickle cell disease which is characterized by a crescent-shaped cell and I was able to distinguish between sickle cells and healthy cells with a 95.6 percent accuracy,” she was quoted as saying by American Bazaar. “Typically, blood-related diseases are screened by doctors who look at blood under a microscope and are normally looking for abnormalities”.

Eshika’s invention is a time and cost effective method. “Having this software do the analysis and having the smartphone microscope allows it to be used very fast,” she explained adding “it gives more people access to screenings.”

The two young Indian American teens were among 40 finalists who over the course of a week, March 7 to 13, presented their innovative research projects to eminent judges, competed for more than $1.8 million in awards.

By Sowmya Sangam