Teh One Who Knocks
12-12-2011, 01:29 PM
By Sharon Noguchi - The San Jose Mercury News
http://i.imgur.com/wPXLj.jpg
For her design of a cancer-fighting technique that targets tumors and leaves healthy tissue intact, Angela Zhang, of Cupertino, has won a best-of-the-best national science competition and a $100,000 scholarship. She is all of 17 years old.
Zhang, a senior at Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, won the grand prize in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, which funds and recognizes outstanding achievement. She designed a gold-iron oxide nanoparticle to deliver chemotherapy. It's like sending in a cellphone-carrying ninja to assassinate cancer stem cells and report back while in action.
"She showed great creativity and initiative in designing a nanoparticle system that can be triggered to release drugs at the site of the tumor while also allowing for non-invasive imaging. Her work is an important step in developing new approaches to the therapeutic targeting of tumors via nanotechnology," competition judge Tejal Desai, a professor at UC San Francisco, said in a statement.
Sound complicated? Zhang realizes it is, as she continually apologizes for the technical terms in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C., where she received the award Monday.
In a team competition, Jeffrey Ling of Palo Alto High and Helen Jiang of Gunn High in Palo Alto together won a $10,000 scholarship in the bioengineering category.
Winning the Siemens competition and being honored with other high school scientists and mathematicians,
Zhang said, is a dream come true. "This is a Cinderella moment for a science nerd like me."
Zhang said she has an abiding curiosity about things, nurtured by her father, Yifong Zhang, who gave her puzzles to do when they went out for ice cream Sunday evenings. Why are manhole covers round? Why do hotel faucets gush hot water on tap, but house faucets take a while to warm up? She had a week to figure them out.
But her mother, Jenny Wu, said that she didn't particularly push her only child to excel. "We tell her to enjoy life, have fun with friends," said Wu, a business consultant. "She has a passion for doing research."
That passion led Angela Zhang, as a ninth-grader, to ask professor Zhen Cheng of the Stanford University School of Medicine if she could work in his molecular imaging lab. He told her she was too young, but offered a compromise: to read and attend seminars. Zhang did, got excited and mapped out her own research.
"I'd hear something cool and change my mind every single day," she said.
But just listening was as frustrating as it was fascinating, she said. "It's like having courtside seats instead of playing" in a tennis match. "You can see every drop of sweat on the players and watch their strategy."
Zhang devised her experiment to target tumors, instead of blasting the body with chemicals, which also destroy healthy cells and cause side effects. Harnessing cutting-edge research into nanotechnology, she injected tumor cells into mice -- "I'm sorry, that must sound horrible" -- let them grow and then injected a nanoparticle carrying the cancer-fighting drug salinomycin.
Tracking the particle with an infrared laser, she found that the tumors diminished.
The research ate up her afternoons and weekends. Her parents did a lot of driving to and from Stanford. Her friends teased that the most exercise she got was carrying around textbooks.
"I had to make some sacrifices," she said. "I had less TV time."
For work on her project, Zhang won the grand award at the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair, both last year and this year.
Defying the science-only nerd image, Zhang plays golf and piano, and relaxes by kayaking in Stevens Creek Reservoir. Her favorite book is F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise." And she hopes to persuade her mother to buy her a first-edition "The Great Gatsby." The request is in, but she said "I don't know the status of that right now."
For now, she has college applications to complete, and there's the honors physics exam that she missed while in D.C., she said. "I can't wait to make it up."
http://i.imgur.com/wPXLj.jpg
For her design of a cancer-fighting technique that targets tumors and leaves healthy tissue intact, Angela Zhang, of Cupertino, has won a best-of-the-best national science competition and a $100,000 scholarship. She is all of 17 years old.
Zhang, a senior at Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, won the grand prize in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, which funds and recognizes outstanding achievement. She designed a gold-iron oxide nanoparticle to deliver chemotherapy. It's like sending in a cellphone-carrying ninja to assassinate cancer stem cells and report back while in action.
"She showed great creativity and initiative in designing a nanoparticle system that can be triggered to release drugs at the site of the tumor while also allowing for non-invasive imaging. Her work is an important step in developing new approaches to the therapeutic targeting of tumors via nanotechnology," competition judge Tejal Desai, a professor at UC San Francisco, said in a statement.
Sound complicated? Zhang realizes it is, as she continually apologizes for the technical terms in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C., where she received the award Monday.
In a team competition, Jeffrey Ling of Palo Alto High and Helen Jiang of Gunn High in Palo Alto together won a $10,000 scholarship in the bioengineering category.
Winning the Siemens competition and being honored with other high school scientists and mathematicians,
Zhang said, is a dream come true. "This is a Cinderella moment for a science nerd like me."
Zhang said she has an abiding curiosity about things, nurtured by her father, Yifong Zhang, who gave her puzzles to do when they went out for ice cream Sunday evenings. Why are manhole covers round? Why do hotel faucets gush hot water on tap, but house faucets take a while to warm up? She had a week to figure them out.
But her mother, Jenny Wu, said that she didn't particularly push her only child to excel. "We tell her to enjoy life, have fun with friends," said Wu, a business consultant. "She has a passion for doing research."
That passion led Angela Zhang, as a ninth-grader, to ask professor Zhen Cheng of the Stanford University School of Medicine if she could work in his molecular imaging lab. He told her she was too young, but offered a compromise: to read and attend seminars. Zhang did, got excited and mapped out her own research.
"I'd hear something cool and change my mind every single day," she said.
But just listening was as frustrating as it was fascinating, she said. "It's like having courtside seats instead of playing" in a tennis match. "You can see every drop of sweat on the players and watch their strategy."
Zhang devised her experiment to target tumors, instead of blasting the body with chemicals, which also destroy healthy cells and cause side effects. Harnessing cutting-edge research into nanotechnology, she injected tumor cells into mice -- "I'm sorry, that must sound horrible" -- let them grow and then injected a nanoparticle carrying the cancer-fighting drug salinomycin.
Tracking the particle with an infrared laser, she found that the tumors diminished.
The research ate up her afternoons and weekends. Her parents did a lot of driving to and from Stanford. Her friends teased that the most exercise she got was carrying around textbooks.
"I had to make some sacrifices," she said. "I had less TV time."
For work on her project, Zhang won the grand award at the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair, both last year and this year.
Defying the science-only nerd image, Zhang plays golf and piano, and relaxes by kayaking in Stevens Creek Reservoir. Her favorite book is F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise." And she hopes to persuade her mother to buy her a first-edition "The Great Gatsby." The request is in, but she said "I don't know the status of that right now."
For now, she has college applications to complete, and there's the honors physics exam that she missed while in D.C., she said. "I can't wait to make it up."