Cupertino High senior named semifinalist in national math, science competition

Utkarsh TandonCourtesy of Utkarsh Tandon Facebook.

A Cupertino High student was named a semifinalist in the nation’s oldest and most prestigious national math and science competition for high school seniors.

Utkarsh Tandon, 18, was one of nearly three hundred braniacs selected out of 1,818 entrants as a semifinalist of the 2018 Regeneron Science Talent Search, a 76-year program whose alumni have gone on to win 13 Nobel Prizes, 11 National Medals of Science, two Fields Medals, 18 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships and five Breakthrough Prizes.

Tandon was chosen for a project related to the detection of early-onset schizophrenia. Or in the words of the scientists, the project involved “diffusion tensor imaging enabled tractographical modeling of early-onset schizophrenia through a machine learning predictor of novel cingulate-orbitofrontal fiber abnormalities.”

The honor for innovation is nothing new for Tandon, who is the founder and CEO of OneRing (see video below), an intelligent tool for monitoring Parkinson’s Disease. That product earned distinction at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Tandon was one of seven students from the Fremont Union High School District to be named semifinalists. The others are Lynbrook High’s Jasper Jing-chieh Huang, Rohan Mehrotra, Advait Patil, Vinay Senthil, Melissa Lily Wei and Bill Zhu.

They were among nearly 300 semifinalists. Each scholar receives a $2,000 award with an additional $2,000 going to his or her respective school.

On Jan. 23, 40 finalists will be chosen to compete in Washington, D.C in March. “They will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C. from March 8–14, during which they will compete for more than $1.8 million in awards provided by Regeneron, including the top award of $250,000,” competition organizers said.

For more information on the competition, read this blog post on Medium.