Raghavendra Ramachanderan, a student of St John's International Residential School in Chennai, has won US $ 5,000 for his research in drug synthesis at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), touted as the world's largest high school science research competition. Ramachanderan's groundbreaking work could help in developing drugs to fight cancer, bacteria and fungus. Eight others who travelled from India to Los Angeles also bagged the awards at the fair, which concluded on Sunday. Ramachanderan, who won the Best of Category Award, took a year-long break from formal studies after completing class X to pursue his love for Chemistry.
"When I discussed about a break to study chemistry, my father and teachers were open. My teacher Subramanian was my inspiration. He would even recommend books. This helped me understand the subject better," he says. Among other students who participated in the competition were Ankur and Hetal Vaishnav, siblings from Rajkot in Gujarat. They succeeded in recycling rexine, which is currently burnt for disposal.
Pramoda Vishnumurthy and Bhargava Subbanna from a small town Puttur in Karnataka were also excited for the applause they got for making eco-friendly ink from Terminalia chebula, a giant tree abundant in Western Ghats. Manosij Dastidar of Kolkata bagged the second place for his work in number theory. Abhishek Khanna and Akansha Verma of New Delhi bagged the fourth place for finding natural weed species to kill pests.
Diksha Gupta of New Delhi received an American Society for Microbiology award for devising an eco-friendly anti-fungal agent.
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