On a list of Pennsylvania’s top high school students, Janet Song of Audubon would almost certainly qualify as one of the outstanding performers in this year’s graduation class. First in her class of 457 at Methacton High School, Song was recently selected as a finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, a program of the Society for Science & the Public, which each year identifies 30 top U.S. high school seniors preparing for a career in science.
That honor, which brought with it a scholarship, an opportunity to present scientific work in a poster session at the National Science Foundation, and a meeting at the White House last month with President Barack Obama, recognized more than her high marks in school work.
The 66-year-old Science Talent Search, which Intel has sponsored since 1998, identifies high school seniors who have demonstrated important achievements as young scientists-and counts among its alumni 6 Nobel Prize winners. Song made it to the finals as co-inventor of a patented method for early, non-invasive detection of cancer. She has also published that work, which began in the summer after her first year in high school, as co-author in a refereed scientific paper.
“My original goal was to go into politics,” she said. However, the invitation to work for a summer at the Hepatitis B Foundation, under supervision of Dr. Timothy Block, chairman and president of the foundation and professor at Drexel University School of Medicine, “opened my eyes to true cutting edge science and really grabbed my interest.”
Last summer, she studied at MIT’s Research Science Institute for high school seniors, where she was encouraged to apply to the Intel Science Talent Search. She has been a presenter at a medical conference in Moscow. She has qualified for the upcoming international BioGeneius competition. Already accepted at MIT, she learned this week that she has also been invited to be an undergraduate at Yale, Princeton, and Harvard, where she will be enrolling for the new academic year.
Source: Society for Science & the Public, Janet Song
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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