Fourteen Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) students -- 12 from Montgomery Blair High School and one each from Walt Whitman and Thomas S. Wootton high schools -- have been named among 300 semifinalists in the 62nd Intel Science Talent Search.

Blair had more semifinalists than any other school in the nation except for Stuyvesant High School in New York City. MCPS had 14 of the 18 semifinalists in Maryland, tying the state with California as second in the number of state semifinalists, behind only New York.

MCPS semifinalists and their project titles are:

Montgomery Blair High School

§ Mohamed Abutaleb, Classical Simulations of the Dynamics of Capacitively Coupled Josephson Junction Qubits
§ Matthew Baron, Polarization-Mode Dispersion Measurements of Multi-mode Optical Fibers
§ Joshua Chang, Quantum Computer Simulator: A Deterministic Model of Synthetic Quantum Gate
§ Christina Feng, Impaired Gene Expression and Activity of Phosphatase 2A in Fibroblasts of Alzheimer's Disease
§ Jeremy Hoffman, Automatically Inferring Ontologies from Databases
§ Evan Karlik, Development of a Surface Plasmon Resonance Bioassay: Immobilization of Membranes Containing the HIV-1 Coreceptor CCR5 to an Engineered Alkanethiol Monolayer
§ Sei-Wook Kim, Robotically Controlled Image Acquisition System for Combinatorial Research in Polymeric Thin Films
§ Wei-Liang William Lai, Predictability of High-dissipation Auroral Activity
§ Andrew Lee, Reducing Size in Integrated Optical Circuitry Using Slotted MMI Regions
§ Anatoly Preygel, Computation of Quandle Cocycle Knot Invariants
§ Alexander Sverdlov, Location of Orthologs by Cluster Analysis (LOCA) Procedure: A New Tool to Classify Evolutionary Relationships of Proteins
§ Joseph Wakeman-Linn, An Experimental Comparison of Visual-Motor Map Development Between Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder and Children Who Are Developing Typically

Walt Whitman High School

§ Neir Eshel, Selection and Anticipation in a Reward-related Task: An fMRI Study

Thomas S. Wootton High School

§ Kartik Pattabiraman, The Expression and Role of Cholecystokinin-8 on the Migration of Gonadotrophin Releasing

The 300 semifinalists were selected from among 1,581 applicants representing 164 high schools in 47 states, District of Columbia and Virgin Islands.

Each of the semifinalists will receive $1,000 in recognition of their scientific achievements. In addition, each school that placed a semifinalist in the competition will receive $1,000 per semifinalist to be used for the school's science and math education programs.

Forty finalists will be chosen to attend the Science Talent Institute in Washington, D.C., from March 6-11, where they will participate in a final judging process and share in $530,000 in scholarships. The top prize winners will be announced at a March 11 banquet and awards ceremony.