For the third year, CERN hosted in June the visit of 12 pre-college students who won the CERN Special Award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) 2011. The Intel ISEF is the world's largest international pre-college science competition offering a yearly forum for more than 1,500 high school students from over 65 countries to showcase their independent research tackling challenging scientific questions. The organizer, ‘Society for Science & the Public’, partners with Intel, along with dozens of other corporate, academic, government and science-focused sponsors, to reward the best students, all winners of national competitions.

The CERN Special Award was established in 2009, when Craig Barrett, Intel’s chairman of the Board at the time, visited CERN as part of Intel’s partnership in CERN openlab. Craig Barrett and Wolfgang von Rüden, former IT Department Head, defined the award as a 5-day trip to CERN for 12 students, co-funded by CERN and Intel. The first students came to CERN in June 2009. Now in its third year, this Special Award proves to be extremely popular. The award winners went through a thorough selection process. Applicants had to excel in an online test before being reviewed by Alberto Pace and Wolfgang von Rüden at the fair in Los Angeles. The final selection was based on their evaluation of the students’ projects and on individual interviews.

The 2011 Intel-ISEF CERN Special Award winners, with judges Alberto Pace (left) and Wolfgang von Rüden (right). (Image credit: Society for Science & the Public.)

This year’s winners are: Arjun Aggarwal, David Alexandre Joseph Campeau, Brian Ronal Graham, Emil Timergalievich Khabiboulline, Jayanth Krishnan, Pratheek Nagaraj, Nicholas James Nothom, Sahir Raoof, Kamal Shah, Andrey Sushko, Aishwarya Ananda Vardhana and Nicole Yeechi Tsai. Despite their young age, all are already well-acquainted with science, having done projects covering topics as diverse as ‘Anthropometric Interactive Robot with Vision Intelligence & Speech’, ‘Regulatory Signatures of Cancer Cell Lines Inferred from Gene Expression Data’ and ‘Method of Optimizing the Monte Carlo Statistical Algorithm to Increase Computational Efficiency in Multidimensional Integration’, to name just a few. One finalist even built an electron accelerator in his basement.

The students visited the Large Hadron Collider facility and enjoyed presentations from various prominent physicists and engineers. They particularly appreciated a few hours of individual coaching by a scientist on a topic selected by the student. Visits to Geneva, EPFL and the region were also part of their programme.

"We are all very impressed by the high level and the quality of their projects", explains Wolfgang von Rüden, who hosted the visit. "It is a real pleasure to be with these bright students and it is a great satisfaction to witness that each year several decide to move into physics after visiting CERN".

He also stressed the strong partnership Intel and CERN built over the years since the start of CERN openlab in 2001. Intel not only collaborates on computing projects but also supports the CERN openlab Summer Student Programme. In fact, after just one year at university, one of the 2010 ISEF award winners qualified to join this programme.

=======================================================================

Further details about the visit programme, the students and their projects are available in the following websites and articles:
Schedule for ISEF2011 students visit to CERN

CERN Bulletin Issue: 28/2011 & 29/2011, Mon 11 Jul 2011, BUL-NA-2011-176

Interviews of the CERN Special Award winners 2011 on the CMS experiment YouTube TV.

Eliza McNitt, ISEF winner in 2009, produced this documentary about her group's visit.