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Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Academy Senior Snags Big Intel Prize
By Andrea Schoellkopf
Copyright © 2010 Albuquerque Journal
Journal Staff Writer
An Albuquerque Academy senior on Tuesday won the $100,000 top prize at the Intel Science Talent Search competition, an honor considered a "junior Nobel Prize."
Erika DeBenedictis, 18, was chosen over 1,600 other students and is the first New Mexican to achieve the honor in the contest's 68-year history. Her name was announced during a black-tie gala at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.
Her project developed a software navigation system to help spacecraft move through the universe using gravity's pull as an alternative fuel source. She found that the gravity and movement of planets create "easy transit routes," which will ultimately help spacecraft move faster and with less fuel.
While the method has been used to navigate for space missions over the years, including the NASA Genesis mission, DeBenedictis wanted to design a software system to navigate planetary travel, according to a March 16 article about DeBenedictis in the Smithsonian.com Web site.
The Intel award is considered a junior Nobel Prize. Winners have gone on to win more than 100 of the world's coveted awards, including seven Nobel Prizes, three National Medals of Science, 11 MacArthur Foundation fellowships and two Fields medals, an international award to mathematicians under the age of 40.
DeBenedictis was among 40 finalists flown to Washington to undergo a rigorous judging process and interact with leading scientists, meet with national leaders and display their research.
DeBenedictis, who has been accepted to Cal Tech and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, already had won more than $80,000 in prizes and scholarships for her science work and has been named a Davidson Fellow and first-prize winner of the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge.
The award was also a proud one for Intel locally, whose officials surprised DeBenedictis at home with her finalist news.
"Erika is a shining example of New Mexico's best and brightest students excelling in math and science who apply those skills toward solving some of today's greatest challenges," said Liz Shipley, Intel New Mexico's education manager.
The last time New Mexico had a top-10 winner in the Intel competition was with Robert Cordwell of Manzano High, who won fourth place in 2005.
This year's finalists came from 18 states and 36 schools. Some 300 semifinalists were announced in January.
The Intel Science Talent Search encourages students to tackle challenging project topics, which this year included: inequity in high school science research programs; examining behavioral factors in breast cancer cures; increasing the performance of organic solar cells and organic light-emitting diodes; semantic image retrieval; comparing language perception, production, and memory in older and younger adults; and chemotherapy and antibiotic drug resistance.
Intel has sponsored the event since 1998. It has been operated by Society for Science and the Public since its inception in 1942.
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