Sep 27, 2011
Nine Indian American youngsters have been named 2011 Davidson Fellows based on their achievements in the fields of science, technology, mathematics, music and literature. Four of the Indian American students will receive $25,000 while the other five will receive $10,000 scholarships from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development.
The Davidson Fellows Scholarship awards scholarships to extraordinary young people, 18 and under, who have completed a significant piece of work. The Davidson Fellows Scholarship program has provided nearly $4.5 million in scholarship funds to 184 Fellows since its inception. Earlier this year, the program was named one of the most prestigious undergraduate scholarships by U.S. News & World Report.
The $25,000 scholarship recipients are Arjun Aggarwal, 16, of Columbia, South Carolina; Siddhartha Jena, 17, of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; Caleb Kumar, 15, of Blaine, Minn.; and Sunil Pai, 17, of Houston, Texas.
The $10,000 scholarship recipients are Cheenar Banerjee, 16, of Rochester, Minn.; Jayanth Krishnan, 17, of Mahopac, New York; Anirudh Prabhu, 16, of West Lafayette, Ind.; Shalini Ramanan, 17, of Richland, Wash.; and Raja Selvakumar, 15, of Alpharetta, Georgia.
Priyanka Menon, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, received honorable mention for her work on "Indo-US Relations through Philosophy and Literature."
Arjun Aggarwal created GNut-III, an Anthropometric Interactive Robot with Vision, Intelligence and Speech. He found the lack of an economically efficient and functional human robot has prohibited researchers from continuing to expand the field of robotics.
Siddhartha Jena demonstrated that the immediate effect of elevated cholesterol is dysfunction of active water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide transport by the red blood cells.
Caleb Kumar developed an algorithm that automates the diagnosis of bladder cancer. Bladder cancer is on the rise with more than 71,000 new cases in 2009.
Sunil Pai constructed an inexpensive, nanotechnology-based system to determine quantum energies of superoxide.
