Indian American students from the ninth through the 12th grade won many Special Awards at the 2016 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, organized by the Society for Science and the Public in partnership with the Intel Foundation.

The teen winners, who won awards or recognition from more than one association or organization, are comprised of high school students who won a top prize at a local, regional, state or national science fair.

A second place award of $1,000 from the American Physiological Society went to Aarushi Iris Pendharkar, 14, of Worcester, Mass.

Receiving a first place award of $2,500 for her Sustainable Urban Design project from the Alcoa Foundation was Naveena Bontha, 16, of Richland, Wash., while the second spot was won by Pujan Sanjaykumar Patel, 16, of Rochester, Minnesota, who earned $1,500 for his Sustainable Design In Transportation project.

Megha Vyakaranam, 15, from Independence High School in Frisco, Texas, won the Ricoh USA Inc.’s Ricoh Sustainable Development Award of $12,500, for her project, “A Super Soaker for Greenhouse Gas: The Design and Synthesis of a Novel Metal Organic Framework for Adsorption and Storage of Gases like CO2.”

Vineet Edupuganti, of Portland, Oregon, took home the American Chemical Society’s first prize of $4,000 for his project, “Fabrication, Characterization, and Modeling of a Biodegradable Battery for Transient Electronics”; Anjali Chakradhar, of Lincroft, New Jersey, won the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists’ fourth prize of $250; Harish Palani, of Portland, Oregon, won the American Geosciences Institute’s third place award of $500; and Siona Prasad, of Alexandria, Virginia, won the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s first place award of $1,000.

Sapna K. Patel and Nikhil Sanjay Patel, of Oviedo, Florida, walked away with the American Psychological Association’s top awards. While Sapna won the first award of $1,500, Nikhil grabbed the third spot winning $500. Divya Vatsa, of Scottsdale, Arizona, also placed third.

The American Society for Horticultural Science presented a $500 award to Ambika Murali, of Pago Pago, American Samoa, while the American Statistical Association gave a second place award of $1,000 to Swetha Revanur, of San Jose, Calif.

Indian American winners of Arizona State University’s Intel ISEF Scholarship were: Divya Vatsa, of Scottsdale, Arizona; Ritika Bharati, Vedik Navale and Sachin Ganesh Konan of Chandler, Arizona; and Pujan Sanjaykumar Patel, of Rochester, Minnesota.

Shishir Dholakia and Shashank Dholakia, of Adrian C. Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, Calif., won the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and the American Astronomical Society’s Priscilla and Bart Bok first award of $1,000 for their project, “A Search and Exploration of Multi-Exoplanet Systems Using Novel Photometric and TTV Algorithms for the K2 Mission.”

ASU Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives’ first prize of $2,500 went to Shantanu Jakhete, of Stuart, Florida.

Drexel University’s full tuition scholarship was won by Ananya Satyawadi, of Pittsburgh, Pa; Aditya Jog, of Mason, Ohio; and Arjun Srinivasan Ramani, of West Lafayette, Indiana.

An all expense paid trip from the European Organization for Nuclear Research-CERN to tour CERN was given to Rucha Joshi, of Austin, Texas.

Vikul Gupta, of Portland, Oregon, won the Bruno Kessler Foundation Award; Vineet Shah, of Poolesville, Maryland, won GoDaddy’s $1,500 Forward Thinker Award; and Rahul Ramesh, of Chandler, Arizona, won GoDaddy’s $1,500 Mobile Application Award.

Google’s Thinking Big Award went to Shreyas Kapur, of Delhi, India.

Karthik Yegnesh, of Eagleville, Pa., took home the K. T. Li Foundation’s Special Award of $1,000, scoring second place; Columbia, South Carolina-based Sarayu K. Das and Portland, Oregon-based Chaitanya Dasharathi Karamchedu, won King Abdul-Aziz & his Companions Foundation for Giftedness and Creativity’s $1,000 award for Water Technology; Karthik Yegnesh, of Eagleville, Pa., won Mu Alpha Theta, National High School and Two-Year College Mathematics Honor Society’s first prize of $1,500; while Arvind Krishna Ranganathan, from Mumbai, India, grabbed the second spot winning $1,000.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s top award of $5,000 was won by Shishir Dholakia and Shashank Dholakia, of Santa Clara, Calif.; Nikhil Murthy from Portland, Oregon, won the second prize of $2,000; and Eshika Saxena of Bellevue, Wash., and Delhi, India’s Shreyas Kapur, came in third, each earning $1,000.

Shreveport, Louisiana-based Meghana Srivyas Rao won the National Anti-Vivisection Society’s second prize of $2,000, while Dublin, Ohio-based Rama Nidhya Balasubramaniam won a third place prize of $1,000.

Karthik Yegnesh, of Eagleville, Pa., and Rucha Joshi, of Austin, Texas, won the NSA Research Directorate’s second prize of $1,000.

Anushka Prasad Jogalekar, of Evergreen Valley High School, San Jose, Calif.; Rucha Joshi, of Westwood High School, Austin, Texas; and Uma Sethuraman, of William P. Clements High School, Sugar Land, Texas, were the winners of Oracle Academy’s $5,000 award for outstanding project in the systems software category.

Nikhil Sanjay Patel, of Oviedo, Florida; Anirudh Jain, of Portland, Oregon; and Kavita Selva of Houston, Texas, won the Patent and Trademark Office Society’s first award of $500; Patel also took home the Psi Chi, The International Honor Society in Psychology’s first prize of $2,500. Honolulu, Hawaii-based Rajeev Jha won Psi Chi’s third prize of $1,000.

San Jose, Calif.-based Anushka Prasad Jogalekar took home the Qatar Foundation, Research & Development’s first prize award of $1,000; Prashant Sai Godishala, of Golden Valley, Minnesota, won Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society’s second Physical Science Award of $1,000.

The USAID Global Development Innovation award of $10,000 went to Portland, Oregon native Chaitanya Dasharathi Karamchedu and Rahul Ramesh of Chandler, Arizona.

Karamchedu won for his project, “Addressing Global Water Scarcity with a Novel Hydrogel Based Desalination Technique Using Saponified Starch-g-polyacrylamide and Its Hydrophilic Properties to Harvest Fresh Water with a Low Energy and Chemical Footprint,” while Ramesh won for “A Novel Algorithm for Detection of Plasmodium falciparum Parasites in Digitized Blood Samples.”

Sanath Kumar Devalapurkar, of Torrance, Calif., and Vikul Gupta, of Portland, Oregon, won $3,000 in shares of United Technologies Corporation common stock, for projects showing excellence in science and engineering.

Five Indian American students won the University of Arizona’s Tuition Scholarship Award, for demonstrating robust research for the greater good of society: Divya Prabhakaran, of Plano, Texas; Ritika Bharati, of Chandler, Arizona; Anshul Bhatnagar of Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Kailash Raman of Phoenix, Arizona; and Eshika Saxena of Bellevue, Washington.

San Jose, Calif.-based Tanisha Joshi and Louisville, Kentucky native Lavanya Sai Kanneganti walked away with a Tuition Scholarship of $15,000 per year for four years, from the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.

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