Seniors Nicholas Tang and Sagar Indurkhya of the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics in Durham will share a $40,000 scholarship for their performance at the national finals of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. The results of the competition were announced this morning at a news conference in New York City.

Tang, 17, of Cary, and Indurkhya, 17, of Charlotte, teamed up for a project in the emerging field of synthetic biology, which applies computer science and engineering to biology. They’re trying to design biological networks like electronic networks to show how bacteria can one day be programmed to perform functions such as attacking diseases and correcting genetic problems.

Lingchong You and Jingdong Tian of Duke University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering served as mentors for the project, “Engineering Synthetic Oscillatory Gene Networks at the Population Level.” Myra Halpin, dean of science at the School of Science and Math, was the team’s advisor.

They got involved in the field through their attendance at the School of Science and Math, a public boarding school educating many of the state’s best students. The School of Science and Math has won the top prize in the team category twice since 2000.

Scott Molony, Steven Arcangeli and Scott Horton, seniors at Oak Ridge High School in Oak Ridge, Tenn., will share the $100,000 grand prize scholarship in the team category for developing a technique that could one day help scientists engineer biofuel from plants.

Dmitry Vaintrob, a senior at South Eugene High School in Eugene, Ore., won the $100,000 grand prize scholarship in the individual category for research in an abstract new area of math called string topology.

More than 1,600 students nationally submitted entries in the competition. Last month, Tang and Indurkhya finished first in the competition’s southern region to be invited to New York for the national finals.