(Image source from: Davidson Institute)
Half a dozen Indian-American teenagers have been bestowed with the prestigious 2018 Davidson Fellows Scholarships, named as among "The 10 Biggest scholarships in the World" and one of the "7 Prestigious Undergrad scholarships," in Washington on Friday.
Two of the Indian-Americans received USD 50,000 each as scholarship money and another three got USD 25,000 each.
In all 20 meritorious students from across the country were presented with distinguished scholarships.
The fellowship is offered by the Davidson Institute to students who are 18 years or younger and who demonstrate the development of their talents with a noteworthy work in science, technology, mathematics, music, literature, engineering, philosophy or outside the box.
Pioneering achievements
The 18-year-old Kavya Kopparapu from Virginia and 17-year-old Rahul Subramaniam from Connecticut were recipients of USD 50,000 each as Davidson Fellows laureates. Kopparapu was recognized for her ground-breaking personalized, targeted treatment for cancer patients and Subramaniam for developing an early warning system for Zika virus in mosquito populations.
Three of the Indian-Americans Marissa Sumathipala from Virginia, Sachin Konan from Arizona, and Eeshan Tripathi from New Jersey attained the 2018 Davidson Fellows award of USD 25,000 scholarship respectively.
Konan's development addresses the retrieval of buried earthquake victims after natural disasters. He was enthused to build a system proficient of detecting humans through debris after watching the shocking news feeds of families and first-response teams searching for buried victims in the 2015 Nepal earthquake.
Tripathi, 16, received the award for applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to find a key for poor Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). His research on IAQ has the prospective to avert diseases, save millions of lives and billions of dollars from misplaced productivity.
Marissa, 18, earned the honor for her novel heart disease therapeutic that treats all of the disease's components at the same time by attacking vital cellular processes that are the root cause of heart disease.
Rajiv Movva, 18, from California is a receiver of the USD 10,000 scholarship for building a computer model that can use a specific DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) order as input to predict gene expression level as output, which sheds much light on the ill tacit "dark genome" that does not straight code for proteins.
All Davidson Fellows likewise received a letter from the United States president Donald Trump in which he fortified the champs to "apply their knowledge and talents to serve our communities".
-Sowmya Sangam
