2000 Intel Science Talent Search Top Ten Winners

Updated June 26, 2020 | Infoplease Staff

First Place: $50,000 scholarship, Natalia Toro, 14, Fairview High School, Boulder, Colo., for her physics project “Independent Analysis of Evidence for nu_mu <—> nu_tau Oscillations in the Super-Kamiokande Atmospheric Neutrino Data.” Ms. Toro is the youngest student ever to win the top prize. Her project studied oscillations of neutrinos, the most elusive of subatomic particles.

Second Place: $40,000 scholarship, David Moore, 18, Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Springs, Md., for his physics project “Quantum Calculations to Determine Electrical Properties for Molecular Electronic Rectifying Diodes.” He used detailed quantum modeling techniques to determine the electrical properties of a newly proposed design for molecular electronic switches.

Third Place: $30,000 scholarship, Keith Winstein, 17, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), Aurora, Ill., for his computer science project “Lexical Steganography through Adaptive Modulation of the Word Choice Hash.” His research focused on steganography, techniques for embedding information in computerized data without making any perceptible change to the original material.

Fourth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Carol Anne Fassbinder, 18, Valley Community High School, Elgin, Iowa, for her biology project “Analysis of Monoterpenoids for Control of the Varroa jacobsoni.” Her work uncovered a new control for Varroa jacobsoni, a parasitic mite that is crippling beekeeping in the state of Iowa.

Fifth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Rio Gabriel Bennin, 17, a home-schooled senior from Berkeley, Calif., who presented a mathematics project, “N-Dimensional Equalizers and Pythagorean Quadrilaterals,” which obtained a method for dividing a geometric figure, such as a triangle, into two equal parts.

Sixth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Lisa Beth Schwartz, 17, Roslyn High School, Roslyn Heights, N.Y., whose mathematics project explored patterns in two-way sequences of positive integers.

Seventh Place: $15,000 scholarship, Scott Alexander Fruhan, 17, Roxbury Latin School, West Roxbury, Mass., who presented a biology study on T cells in multiple sclerosis patients. Mononuclear T cells control the body's immune response.

Eighth Place: $15,000 scholarship, Kurt Elliott Mitman, 16, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, Va. He presented an astrophysics study on the highly energetic astronomical phenomena known as gamma ray bursts (GRBs) at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Ninth Place: $15,000 scholarship, Diana Barnard Townsend-Butterworth, 17, Chapin School, New York, N.Y., for her biology project that investigated Alzheimer's disease. She focused on the effects on the human brain cells of cadmium, a potentially lethal heavy metal found in cigarettes and many household items.

Tenth Place: $15,000 scholarship, Alexander David Wissner-Gross, 17, Great Neck High School, Great Neck, N.Y. He combined physics, chemistry, computers, and engineering for his study of ionized C60 molecules, called fullerenes or “buckyballs,” as a nanoscopic, granular medium.