From left: Shree Bose, Naomi Shah, and Lauren Hodge, the winners of the Google Science Fair.
At Google’s first-ever science fair, women came out on top.
Open to teens ages 13 to 18, Google’s competition was the first international science fair to require online submissions instead of the traditional posterboards and presentations that collegiettes™ will remember from their high school days. More than 10,000 students representing nearly 100 countries entered the fair, the NY Times reports.
The first, second, and third place winners were all girls. Grand prize winner Shree Bose, 17, of Forth Worth, Texas, designed a project to improve ovarian cancer treatment. Bose developed a method to maintain the effectiveness of a chemotherapy drug. Google awarded her a $50,000 scholarship for college, a trip to the Galapagos Islands with National Geographic, and a visit to the CERN physics lab in Switzerland.
In the age 15-16 category, first place went to Portland, Oregon native Naomi Shah, 16, who researched the effects of indoor air quality on people with asthma. Claiming the top spot in the age 13-14 category was Lauren Hodge, 14, of Dallastown, Pennsylvania, who researched how different marinades affected the level of cancer-causing agents in grilled meat (lemon juice decreased harmful carcinogens, but soy sauce increased them).
“It just starts to show you that women are stepping up in science,” said Bose, “And I’m excited that I was able to represent maybe just a little bit of that.”
“At the end, we were like, ‘Yeah, girl power!’ ” added Shah. HC congratulates the leading ladies of the Google Science Fair. We can’t wait to see what these girls will be doing by the time they hit college.