2 make Intel finals

Forty finalists were named in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search competition last week, and 5 percent of the honored high school students are from the Five Towns.

Seniors Eric Brooks, from Hewlett High School, and Paul Masih Das, of Lawrence High School, were selected on Jan. 27 to present their science research projects in Washington, D.C, March 11-16 and compete for $630,000 in awards.

Brooks is the first Intel finalist ever from Hewlett High, while Masih Das is the first from Lawrence since 2003.

“It's beyond an honor,” Hewlett High Principal Thomas Russo said of Brooks’s accomplishment. “It is one of the most exciting things I have had in my career.”

“I wasn't really expecting it,” said Brooks, who got a phone call from Intel at home on the night of Jan. 26, the day before the official announcement. “I was shocked.”

Brooks’s project, “Racial Disparity in Prostate Cancer Characterized through Evolutionary Modeling of the Genome,” focused on how genetic factors affect prostate cancer. He worked on it at New York University Medical Center and conducted research online, studying patients with aggressive and less aggressive forms of the disease. The project was mentored by Hewlett High science teacher Dr. Terence Bisoondial and facilitated by Dr. Patricia Nardi, a social science teacher.

“As much as he is a scholar, he is very altruistic in his work,” Nardi said of Brooks. “That combination of scholarship and altruism is a great combination, and I have said to him more than once that I think that it is very possible in the future that he could win a Nobel Prize in medicine.”

Brooks is not only a scientist, but a member of the high school orchestra and the Fed Challenge Team. He plans to focus on a science-related field in college.

Masih Das got the news that he was a finalist while at SUNY-Stony Brook's Garcia Research Center, where he did much of the work for his project, “A Novel Chemical Synthesis for >Mums2 Graphene Sheets.”

“It’s kind of coincidental,” Masih Das said of the circumstances of the phone call from the Intel Foundation. “I was totally surprised because I didn't think my project was that caliber.”