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The finalist will now have a shot at the top prize of $100,000 when they travel to Washington D.C. in March for the final judging. There is also more than $500,000 up for grabs in other prizes and awards. The top 10 will be honored at a ceremony, which President Barack Obama has attended the last few years.
Past Intel Science entrants have gone on to win eight Nobel Prizes, two Fields Medals, five National Medals of Science, 11 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships and an Academy Award for Best Actress.
Guha and Paskov were among 300 semifinalists, 20 of whom were from Westchester, selected from 1,794 entrants from across the U.S. This is the second consecutive year a Horace Greeley student was named a finalist in the prestigious high school science competition.
Guha, whose parents are scientists, is part of Horace Greeley’s Science Research Program, in which students research a topic and conduct experiments with the help of a mentor from a related field.
“We have many talented students in Science Research who are passionate about research and their chosen study topics,” Trudy Gessler, a science teacher, told the school newspaper the Greeley Tribune. “Their research and experiments are all conducted under the supervision of a research scientist, sometimes in a research lab and sometimes right here on the Greeley campus.”
For his research project, Guha worked out of the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Manhattan. He researched how to make dye molecules, used in many biological experiments, last longer. This would remove the need to constantly interrupt experiments by injecting dye.
Guha, who plays jazz piano in two ensembles, also entered his research into the 2013 Siemens Competition, for which he was a semifinalist.
At that same competition, Paskov earned a $3,000 scholarship for his research project to increase the accuracy of drug response predictions for cancer treatments. His mother was diagnosed with cancer when he was in fifth grade. He hopes to continue his research after college, according to the Edgemont School District website.
Paskov is president of his school's Technology Club, and an alto saxophonist.
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