Three Cheers to Woman Power! Three American women have emerged winners at Search Engine Giant Google’s First ever Science Fair.
On Tuesday, at the Google Headquarters, top 15 finalists submitted their projects to a test in front of 1000 attendees and a panel of judges, and, Shree Bose won in the 17-18 age group category and also took home the Grand Prize.
In the age-group of 14-15 Lauren Hodge stood first and Naomi Shah took the lead in the 15-16 category.
Lauren Hodge’s project was ‘the effect of different marinades on the level of potentially harmful carcinogens in grilled chicken.’ Hodge proved that simple changes to your cooking habits can make a big difference to your health. She won a scholarship of $ 25,000 and an internship at Google.
Naomi Shah tried to prove that ‘ making changes to indoor environments that improve indoor air quality can reduce people’s dependence on asthma medications’. Her efforts at providing simple remedies for removing toxins from your indoor environment won her an internship at Google and a scholarship worth $ 25,000.
Shree Bose belonging to the 17-18 age group discovered a way to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients when they have built up a resistance to certain chemotherapy drugs. She received a $50,000 scholarship, a trip to the Galápagos Islands sponsored by National Geographic Explorer and an internship at CERN.
All three were also awarded lifetime digital subscriptions to Scientific American.
The judges said that all the three young women were rewarded for their intellectual curiosity, tenaciousness and their ambition to use science to find solutions to big problems.
They examined complex problems and found both simple solutions that can be implemented by the general public—like changing your cooking habits or removing toxins from your home—as well as more complex solutions that can be addressed in labs by doctors and researchers, such as Shree’s groundbreaking discovery, which could have wider implications for cancer research.
The event was sponsored by CERN, Lego and National Geographic. They reportedly saw “over 7,500 entries from more than 10,000 young scientists in over 90 countries around the world.”