3 LI teens win $70G in Siemens competition

Three Long Island high-school seniors won a total of $70,000 in national prizes Monday for their anti-cancer research - and two said they were motivated by a desire to battle against the disease that has struck family and friends.

Nevin Daniel, 17, of Ward Melville High School in East Setauket, won a $50,000 individual award in the annual Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. The second-place finish by the Port Jefferson Station teen was for developing a system capable of targeting drugs at cancer cells.

Two other 17-year-olds, Nikhil Mehandru of Roslyn High School and Sonya Prasad of the Wheatley School in Old Westbury, won a $30,000 team award. They will share that fourth-place prize with teammate Santhosh Narayan of Munster, Ind.

For their project, Mehandru and Prasad, a Roslyn Heights resident, spent hundreds of hours in a Stony Brook University lab during the summer and fall fabricating a small electronic chip that acts as a sensor in measuring proteins and biomarkers related to cancer.

Both teens say they were motivated because they know friends or a family member stricken with the disease.Two years ago, Mehandru's father was diagnosed with an early stage of pancreatic cancer. The son says he's encouraged, however, by the fact that the disease was detected before it spread.

"If we hadn't caught it in the early stages, it could have tragically become much more virulent," Nikhil Mehandru said Monday, a few minutes after he and teammates accepted their scholarship check at a Washington, D.C., news conference.

Meanwhile, his father, Anil Mehandru, a retired anesthesiologist, watched a live video on his laptop computer at the family's Roslyn home.

"God bless them all, and bless their work," said the proud father, who turns 58 on Saturday.

Nassau and Suffolk counties' three winners this year were the largest number produced on Long Island since 2005, when there were four winners.

As usual, Stony Brook emerged as a major incubator of top-rated Siemens projects. Daniel and Narayan also did their lab work there.

"I knew it was a good investment in my future," said Daniel, who gave up athletics this fall to complete his research.

Miriam Rafailovich, a Stony Brook professor with a long track record of mentoring teenage science whizzes, says she's struck by the large number of those students who come to her university for summer training determined to cure sicknesses.

"Kids at that age are beginning to see illnesses among people, usually their grandparents," Rafailovich observed. "They're very sensitive about that."

But Smita Mehandru, Nikhil's mother, says she often advises parents that children have to develop their own interest in research, rather than being prodded into such arduous work. "You have to have passion for it," she said.

This year's top team prize of $100,000 was taken by Akash Krishnan and Matthew Fernandez of Portland, Ore., for their use of computers in determining emotions in human speech. The top individual prize, also $100,000, was captured by Benjamin Clark of Millersville, Pa., for research related to star formation.

The contest is sponsored by the Siemens Foundation, established with funding from the German-based electronics corporation of the same name.