Saratoga High's Alissa Zhang In Washington, D.C. As Intel Science Contest Finalist

Three Bay Area high school students are attending a ceremony tonight in Washington, D.C., where winners of the Intel Science Talent Search contest will be announced.

The three finalists are among 40 high school seniors selected out of 1,800 students from 44 states, each of them competing for more than $1.25 million in scholarship prize money from the Intel Foundation.

, gained a spot in the final 40 for a project that sought alternatives to finger-pricking for tests that monitor diabetes patients, Saratoga High School Principal Jeff Anderson said.

The test could address the difficulties in monitoring diabetic children who are scared of needles. "It's real, it's not an abstract project," Anderson said. "We're really hoping the best for her."

Jin Pan, of Gunn High School in Palo Alto, is also in the nation's capital for the ceremony.

Pan was chosen for his work in bioinformatics and genomics. His entry was titled "A Novel Protein Translation Kinetics Model Supports the Ribosomal Pause Theory."

Saurabh Sharan, of Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, was chosen for his computer science project, "Parameter Free Graph Based Nuclear Segmentation in Cellular Images Using Morphological Cues."

A four-year, $100,000 scholarship is given to the first-place winner, $75,000 is awarded for second place, and there is a $50,000 scholarship for third place.

All of the finalists will receive a scholarship of at least $7,500.

The contest has been under way for 70 years, and Intel has sponsored it for the past 13 years.

—By Bay City News Service