Twelve students from Montgomery Blair High School were named semifinalists in the 65th Intel Science Talent Search, one of the most prestigious and rigorous science competitions for high school students in the United States.

Blair tied with Ward Melville High School in East Setauket, New York, as having the largest number of Intel semifinalists in the nation. The 12 Blair students were among 15 finalists from Maryland.

The MCPS semifinalists, all from Montgomery Blair High School, and their project titles are:

§ Alexander Mansfield Alm--Vital Signs Monitoring and Patient Tracking for Medical Emergencies
§ Pria Anand--Toward Understanding the Environmental Causes of Breast Cancer: The Effects of in utero Exposure to Indole-3-Carbinol on Breast Cancer Risk Factors
§ Kiran Narayan Bhat--Expression and Subcellular Localization of Chloride Intracellular Channel Protein 4 Are Altered during Tumor Progression
§ Clair Danielle Briggs--Creating a Transgenic Mouse Line that Knocks Out the Expression of Oxytocin in the Endocrine System
§ Lu Chen--Dihydroartemisinin: A New Drug in Therapy of Ovarian Cancer
§ Debbie Fei Cheng--An Experimental Study of Carbon Ordering Kinetics
§ Shwetadwip Chowdhury--ViPAR: A Novel Tool for Visualization, Paint, Alignment, and Rotation in the Study of Cerebellar Peduncle Degeneration and Its Relationship to Ataxia Severity
§ Gregory Liang Howard--The Effectiveness of the Monetary Transmission Mechanism in China
§ Jun Hu--Non-invasive Estimation of Type I Angiotensin II Receptor Abundance through Urine Analysis
§ Minh-Phuong Huynh-Le--Toward Understanding the Global Carbon Cycle: The Response of Soil Organic Matter to Changes in Forest Density and Flora
§ Andy Mengfei Jiang--A New Control Law and Transistorization of Quantum Harmonic Oscillators
§ Yuan Zhang--Oxidized LDL Metabolites Upregulate Expression of the Adhesion Molecule CX3CL1 in Primary Coronary Artery Smooth Muscle Cells

For a complete list of semifinalists, visit the link below. Intel finalists will be announced on January 25, and winners will be announced on March 14.