ORHS seniors wins $30,000 scholarship in national research competition

Note: This story was updated, and a video of Andress and Toth added, at 1:59 p.m. Dec. 5.

They made it to the national finals in a prestigious competition for teen researchers, and on Tuesday, Oak Ridge High School seniors James Andress and A.J. Toth won a $30,000 team scholarship for their work.

Andress and Toth were one of six teams from across the country that made it to the national finals of the 2012 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology in Washington, D.C. this past weekend. Their research could help in the development of anticancer drugs, a press release said.

The two ORHS seniors won an earlier regional competition in Atlanta, where they earned a $6,000 team scholarship.

This weekend’s national contest also included six individuals who placed first in regional competitions.

The contest featured two grand prizes of $100,000 each for the winning team and winning individual. The results were announced Tuesday morning.

Top teams presented research projects on robot navigation and a tumor-suppressing protein. The top individual was Kensen Shi, a senior at A&M Consolidated High School in College Station, Texas. The top team included Jeremy Appelbaum, William Gil, and Allen Shin, seniors at George W. Hewlett High School in Hewlett, New York.

The project by Andress and Toth was titled “Creating a Higher-Efficiency Machine Learning Algorithm to Facilitate the Development of Cancer Treatment Drugs.”

“The team used novel computational procedures with active machine learning to classify certain protein mutations important in cancer suppression,” a Siemens Foundation press release said after the regional competition in Georgia. “This classification may lead to the development of new anticancer drugs with lower developmental costs.”

The release said Toth plans to pursue a career in electrical engineering. He hopes to work in management and travel as much as possible. He is an Eagle Scout, National Merit Semifinalist, and AP Scholar who tutors algebra and trigonometry. Toth sings in his church choir and played piano in the ETSBOA Jazz Clinic Blue Band in 2010 and 2011.

Andress is a National AP Scholar, National Merit Semifinalist, and national winner of the EnergySolutions Scholarship, the press release said. He is the lead author of a paper submitted to “Computational Mechanics” on the Boundary Integral Method. He is vice president of his senior class and plays bass in the school jazz band and a local jazz trio. Jim plans to major in math, physics, or computer science and would like to become a researcher or professor with the time and money to travel.

The team’s mentor on their project was Chris Symons at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Watch a video featuring Andress and Toth:

More information, including links to a video of Tuesday morning press conference, are available at http://synapticdigitalvideo.com/siemens/2012/sc2012.html.