Teens get a science prize

Pair will divide a scholarship

A pair of North Carolina teenagers, including one from Cary, won third place Monday in one of the nation's premier high school science competitions.

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

Tang, 17, of Cary, and Indurkhya, 17, of Charlotte, worked on a project in the emerging field of synthetic biology, which applies computer science and engineering to biology. They're attempting to design biological 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, served as the team's adviser.

They got involved in the research 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 area of math called string topology.