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Students Win Science Scholarships

High school students from Connecticut and from North Carolina were named winners Monday of the Siemens Westinghouse Science & Technology Competition.

The individual winner was Mariangela Lisanti, a senior at Staples High School in Westport, Conn. The team winners were Charles Olbert, Christopher Clearfield and Nikolas Williams, all students at the North Carolina School of Science & Math in Durham, N.C.

Lisanti will receive a $100,000 scholarship and the members of the winning team will share a $100,000 scholarship.

The individual runners-up will receive $20,000 scholarships and members of the team runners-up will share $20,000 scholarships.

The Siemens Foundation started the Siemens Westinghouse Science & Technology Competition for high school science students in 1998.

The finalists were all winners in regional competitions that involved demonstrations of original research projects. Judging was by panels of professional scientists or engineers.

The national winners were selected following a round of competitive presentations in Washington over the weekend.

Lisanti's project involved the measure of electrical properties of gold wires that were built on a nanometer scale. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.

The winning team from North Carolina used data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray telescope to analyze a wave of energy moving at high speeds near the remnant of a supernova, or exploded star.

Individual Runners-Up
  • Heidi Hsieh, Smithtown High School, Smithtown, N.Y.
  • Ann Lai, Hathaway Brown School, Shaker Heights, Ohio.
  • Hans Lee, York School, Monterey, Cal.
  • Linda Arnade, Palm Bay High School, Palm Bay, Fla.
  • Samuel Chang, Lyndon B. Johnson High School, Austin, Tex.

The team runners-up members were:

  • Jonathan Curtis and William Martin of Bowie High School, Bowie, Md.
  • Wei Deng and Clayton Smith of Dupont Manual Magnet High School, Louisville, Ky.
  • Peter Stone and Sherman Jia, Ward Melville High School, East Setauket, N.Y.
  • Frank Huang and Peter Chung of Lamp Magnet High School in Montgomery, Ala., and Rachel Wyatt, Cullman High School, in Cullman, Ala.
  • Allan Chu and Chu-Chieh Lin of Saratoga High School, Saratoga, Cal.

©2000 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

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