Two high school student participants in the CEE's summer 2008 Research Science Institute at MIT who were mentored by members of the MIT physics community are named as highly placed award winners in the 2009 Intel Science Talent Search contest.

Reaching ninth place out of a field of over 1,600 contestants was Nilesh Tripuraneni, 18, of Fresno, CA. He received a $20,000 scholarship for "formulating a set of hydrodynamic equations that may provide a potential method to better understand the first movements of the universe, and could aid in the development of a quantum theory of gravity."

Nilesh worked closely with Prof. Krishna Rajagopal of the Center for Theoretical Physics. Rajagopal noted that "Nilesh was in my office daily for five weeks last summer, and we have talked about once every two weeks since then."

Ranking among the top 40 Intel STS finalists, and winning a $5K scholarship and a laptop, was Marianna Mao, 17, of Fremont, CA. As an RSI participant last summer, Marianna's research on compact binaries in globular clusters was supervised by astrophysics graduate students Phillip Zukin and Sarah Vigeland.

For Phillip Zukin, "working with Marianna was a great experience. She's extremely gifted, is able to pick up concepts quickly, and has great intuition. At times, I felt like I was more of a colleague than a mentor."

Both Nilesh and Marianna place MIT high on their list of college applications for next fall.

[March 19, 2009 — Carol Breen, Communications Administrator, MIT Department of Physics]