TAMS students win honors in competition

Two students from the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science were named regional finalists and 14 were named semifinalists in the 2008 Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology. The competition recognizes high school achievements in mathematics, science and technology research.

Wen Chyan and Sameer Deshpande, both second-year TAMS students, were among the 13 Texas students and nearly 100 across the country chosen as regional finalists. 

For his research, Chyan, of Denton, worked in the laboratory with Richard Timmons, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. Chyan engineered new anti-microbial coatings for biomedical devices that could prevent hospital infections caused by the formation of bacterial biofilms on those devices.

Deshpande, of Carrollton, worked with Qiang Zhao, a mathematics professor at Texas State University. His project, which was submitted in the group category, identified genes associated with disease survival. That could allow researchers to study a practical number of genes to target during therapy and to construct models that use genetic data from a DNA micro­array to predict a patient’s chance of survival.

Both students will present their research projects at the Region Two Competition Nov. 14-15 at the University of Texas at Austin. Regional finalists present a poster display of their research and give a presentation to judges. Reg­ional finalists receive $1,000 scholarships.

An individual and team winner will be selected from Region Two, as well as each of the other five regions, to compete in the national finals in December at New York Uni­versity.

TAMS students named semifinalists in this year’s competition were: Firas Abuzaid of Plano, who worked with Mo­hammad Omary, UNT chemistry professor; Matthew Amme of Lewisville, who worked with Tom Cundari, UNT regents professor of chemistry; Irene Cai of Arling­ton, who worked with Douglas Root, UNT biology professor; Helen Chen of Euless, who worked with Nan­dika D’Souza, UNT professor of materials science and engineering; Jonathan Dau of Col­leyville, who worked with Jan­non Fuchs, UNT biology professor; Jack Geller of Coppell, who worked with Eugene Cur­tin, mathematics professor at Texas State; Kevin Holmes of Colleyville, who worked with Angela Wil­son, UNT chemistry professor; Jeremy Lai of Hous­ton, who worked with Angela Wilson, UNT chemistry professor; Alexander Mentzelopoulos of Murphy, who worked with Chalo Matta Aoun, a graduate student of chemistry at UT-Dallas; Mark Pavlyukovskyy of Denton, who worked with Pam­ela Padilla, UNT biology professor; Ramya Raghavan of Plano, who worked with Amelia Eisch, psychiatry professor at UT Southwestern Medical Cen­ter; Aman Sharma of Flower Mound, who worked with Gary Beall, chemistry professor at Texas State; Richard Song of Plano, who worked with George Dai, general manager of Nutech Instrument Technol­ogies; and Monica Tamil of Plano, who worked with Craig Powell, neurology professor at UT Southwestern.