ROCKVILLE, MD-Thirteen students from Montgomery Blair High School--more than any other school in the nation--plus one student each from Winston Churchill High School and Walt Whitman High School were named semifinalists in the 64th Intel Science Talent Search, one of the most prestigious and rigorous science competitions for high school students in the United States.

Three-fourths of the finalists from Maryland--15 out of 20--were from Montgomery County Public Schools.

Last year, Blair also had 13 semifinalists, more than any school in the nation except Stuyvesant High School in New York City. This year, Stuyvesant had five semifinalists, and Thomas Jefferson High School for Science Technology in Alexandria, Va., had five. Ward Melville High School in East Sautucket, N.Y., was close behind Blair with 12 semifinalists.

The Montgomery County Public Schools semifinalists and project titles are:

Montgomery Blair High School

· Ameer Abutaleb, A Nonlinear Analog Scattering VLSI Model for the Cochlea
· Peter Bullen, Effect of Grain Misorientation Texture on the Fractal Character of Heated Calcite
· Patrick Detzner, The Effects of Powder Concentration and Wire Length on the Attenuation of Microwave Powder Filters
· Jeffrey Dunn, Evaluation of Soil Moisture Predictions from GSWP Land Surface Schemes
· Michael Forbes, Capacitated Vehicle Routing and the k-Delivery n-Traveling Salesman Problem
· Abigail Fraeman, Modeling the Distribution of Comets Around the Star IRC +10216
· Sherri Geng, Automated Seizure Detection Using Statistical Analysis of EEG Time-Domain Signals
· Justin Kovac, The Effects of Warm Core Rings on Hurricane Intensification in the Gulf of Mexico
· Tencia Lee, Probing Superstring/M-Theory with Quantum Mechanics
· Renee Park, The Effects of Atmospheric Turbulence on Simulated Starlight in a Low-Pressure Telescope Environment
· Prasanna Vasudevan, Toward Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease: Developing a Method to Determine Activity in the Cerebral Cortex Using Surface Analysis
· Samuel Wight, Improved Sequences for Code Division Multiple Access in 3-D Imaging LADAR
· Kenhui Yin, A Mathematical Model of AV Conduction Block in Time-Domain

Winston Churchill High School

· David Germain, Novel Electron Tomography and Computational Image Analysis Methods Applied to Nanoscale Determination of Cell Architecture

Walt Whitman High School

· Scott Kominers, On Universality Properties of Positive-Definite Integral Quadratic Forms

Each of the 300 semifinalists will receive $1,000 in recognition of their scientific achievements. In addition, schools will receive $1,000 per semifinalist to be used for the school's science and math programs.

The Science Talent Search semifinalists, selected from 1,600 applicants, represent 47 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Students were judged based on their individual research ability, scientific originality, and creative thinking. Projects covered all disciplines of science, including chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering, social science, and biology.

The list will be trimmed to 40 finalists on January 26. The finalists will attend the Science Talent Institute in Washington, D.C. in March to participate in final judging and compete for college scholarships totaling more than $500,000. The finalists will undergo a rigorous interview process, with winners announced at a black-tie banquet on March 15.

For a complete list of semifinalists, visit the link below.