Google ScienceFair 2012 Winners at White House!!!

Nine South Asian American youngsters comprised among the 55 teens who took part in the second White House Science Fair February 7th 2012. The children were selected from among the achievers of numerous science fairs held across the U.S. last year.

“It’s young people like you that make me so confident that America’s best days are still to come,” said the President of the United States announced a new $22 million public/private partnership which will train 100,000 Modern math and science instructors.

Anand Srinivasan, 15, had the distinction of being the only Indian American to exhibit his project to the United States President, who agitated the Roswell, Georgia native’s hand and asked numerous questions about his work. He was a finalist in the 2011 Google Science Fair, has created a robotic arm commanded by the user’s own brain signals.

“I desired to create a bridge over between human and machine,” Srinivasan told India-West. The boy of Srinivasan Ramaswamy and Vasantha Srinivasan is now working on a robotic leg which can be worn by people who are ailed with osteoporosis or arthritis as well as amputees.

The high school second-year wrote a software program that memorializes the body’s own electric signals, amplifies them and directs them to the brain. Srinivasan’s software dispatches the noise from the signal, making it easier to transmit a clean signal to the brain, which in turn makes it easier for the brain to control the robotic arm. Obama and Srinivasan also talked about the function of a robotic arm by wounded Iraq war veterans and other amputees.

Shree Bose, the grand prize winner at last summer’s Google Science fair, also attended the White House Science Fair last week. This was Bose’s second time at the White House: last October, the 17-year-old was called for to a meeting with the president. At that time, Obama met with the three Google winners – all young women – at the Oval Office, spending 15 minutes to acquire about their work.

“In president time, 15 minutes is huge,” the effervescent Bose told India-West.

Bose was inspired to work on cancer therapies, Alakananda Basu, a research worker at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, took the young man of science under her wing for a summertime and allowed for her to work on a breast cancer project and to develop a way to better chemotherapy for ovarian cancer patients who had developed a resistance to Cisplatin, the more common chemotherapy drug.

Other South Asian Americans who demoed their projects at the White House Science Fair included:

• Miraj Rahemaputra, who along with John William Voelker, developed an airplane wing which maximizes fuel efficiency and enhances performance. The project won the 2011 National Championship of the Real World Design Challenge.
• Prarthana Dalal, an 18-year-old fresher at Northwestern University, who won first place at the International BioGENEius Challenge for her research into potential treatments for sickle cell disease.

Other invitees who did not show projects included:

• Shireen Zaineb, an 8th grader in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who created the video game Discover.
• Priyen Patel, an 11th grader living in Seaford, Detroit, who won the media award at the International BioGENEius Challenge.