AUSTIN, Texas—Nine high school students have been selected to compete Nov. 19-20 at The University of Texas at Austin in the southwest regional finals of the Siemens Westinghouse Science & Technology Competition, a scholarship and awards program of the Siemens Foundation.
Finalists include two Texas students, Amanda Chambers, 17, a senior at Sandra Day O’Connor High School in San Antonio, and Anshul Haldipur, 17, a senior at William P. Clements High School in Sugar Land.
The Siemens Westinghouse Science & Technology Competition was created by the non-profit Siemens Foundation to promote math and science education in America. The competition, in its inaugural year, is open to individuals and teams of high school students developing research projects in the physical sciences, the biological sciences and mathematics.
Winners of the six regional U.S. competitions will compete in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 4-6 for a top individual scholarship prize of $100,000. Teams of students are competing for shares of a $90,000 scholarship.
Finalists in the Southwest regional competition entered projects in the fields of chemistry, biology, physics and computer science. They will present their independent research projects to a panel of judges selected by UT Austin on Nov. 20. The competition recognizes student projects for originality, creativity, academic rigor and clarity of communication.
The individual regional winner will receive an award of $20,000 and members of the winning regional team will share a prize of $30,000. All of the prize money will be applied toward the winning students’ undergraduate or graduate education.
The Southwest regional finalists and their categories of competition are:
Erin Casey, Bishop Garcia Diego High School, Santa Barbara, Calif. (biology, individual); Amanda Chambers, Sandra Day O’Connor High School, Helotes, Texas, (chemistry, individual); Bob Cherng, Troy High School, Fullerton, Calif., (chemistry, individual); Shalini Low-Nam, Boulder High School, Boulder, Colo., (biology, individual); Lisa Wang, Iolani School, Honolulu, Hawaii (chemistry, individual); David Bauer, Oak Ridge High School, Oak Ridge, Tenn., (computer science, team leader); Roshitha Dunstan, Oak Ridge High School, Oak Ridge, Tenn., (member of Bauer team); Anshul Haldipur, William P. Clements High School, Sugar Land, Texas, (physics, team leader); and Roberto Torres, Colegio Catolico Notre Dame, Caguas, Puerto Rico (member of Haldipur team).
UT Austin will host the student competitors and their chaperones during activities and tours of university laboratories and facilities. Participants whose entries in the regional competition drew commendation have been invited to the regional event, as have teachers and students from local Austin high schools.
Other regional competitions were scheduled at Carnegie Mellon University (Oct. 29-30); the University of California, Berkeley (Nov. 5-6); the University of Notre Dame and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Nov. 12-13); Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Panels of scientists and university faculty are serving as judges at the regional and national competitions, under the direction of the national education organizations. The College Board and the Educational Testing Service works with the Siemens Foundation to administer the competition.
Siemens Corp., the foundation’s parent company, is involved in such U.S. industries as telecommunications, energy and power, lighting and precision materials, industry and automation, healthcare, microelectronics and components, transportation and information systems. In 1998, Siemens’ U.S. businesses had more than 66,000 employees and sales of more than $11.0 billion.
Siemens AG, based in Berlin and Munich, is one of the world’s largest electrical engineering and electronics companies and employs more than 400,000 people in a total of 193 countries.
For more information, contact Thomas Varney at Siemens Corp. (212) 258-4335 or Esra Ozer Siemens Foundation (212) 258-4348, or visit the website at http://www.siemens-foundation.org.
