3 LI teens win regional titles in Siemens contest

Three Long Island teenagers who spent hundreds of hours working on cancer research won top honors Saturday in a regional competition of the 2010-11 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, a prestigious national tournament for high school students.

Nevin Daniel, 17, a senior at Ward Melville High School in East Setauket, won a $3,000 scholarship in the individual category for his work on developing a speedier cancer drug delivery system.

Sonya Prasad, 17, a senior at The Wheatley School in Old Westbury, and Nikhil Mehandru, 17, a senior at Roslyn High School, shared the team prize with Santhosh Narayan of Munster High School in Indiana for the trio's work on a cancer-detecting and drug delivery system. They will share a $6,000 scholarship.

The winners were announced at a dinner in Pittsburgh last night. As many as eight Long Islanders were among the finalists. The five other finalists from Long Island will receive $1,000 scholarships.

The winners of the regional titles will be eligible to compete in the national finals next month in Washington, D.C., where they will vie for a $100,000 grand prize.

"By successfully attaching a targeting component and a drug to the dendrimers, he was able to build a molecular structure that could potentially be used to treat cancer cells," lead judge Bruce Armitage said of Daniel's work.

"His structure was sophisticated and required a complex, multi-step process to create. The depth of his understanding of organic chemistry is remarkable, usually requires years of training and is rare even for early graduate students," said Armitage, a chemistry professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Referring to the trio's work, Armitage said: "We were most impressed by the team's interdisciplinary approach to their research, which is required for broad impact in this particular area. For such young students to not only be introduced to this method of research, but to be proficient in it as well gives them a huge head start in becoming scientists."

Daniel's project mentor was Iwao Ojima, distinguished professor of chemistry and director of the Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery at Stony Brook University.

Prasad and Mehandru's mentor for their project was Miriam Rafailovich, distinguished professor at Stony Brook University.