BALTIMORE June, 2007— You’re 17, you’re the College Board’s Young Epidemiology Scholar, the USA Today and Intel Science Talent Search have given you top awards, and you’re going before the U.S. congressional bio-medical caucus in June to explain your work on multiple sclerosis. The only thing left is to have your hometown name a day after you. If you’re Megan Blewett, of Madison, New Jersey, you’ve accomplished all of the above. What Megan and 19 other students who’ve won America’s top academic honors this year have in common is the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (www.cty.jhu.edu), a non-profit program for young gifted students based out of Baltimore, Maryland. CTY alumni account for: - Two of the top 16 Scripps Spelling Bee winners, Nithya Vijayakumar of Canton, Michigan and Raymond Soriano of Laredo, Texas
- Seven of USA Today’s 20 High School Academic Team members
- Two of the top six Intel International Science & Engineering Fair awards
- Seven out of 32 American recipients of the 2007 Rhodes Scholarship
- Three of the top 10 finishers in the March 2007 Intel Science Talent Search
CTY student’s Intel results now used by Harvard and MIT
Blewett, along with 19 other students, was selected from almost 1,200 applicants for USA Today’s High School Academic Team. Likewise, more than 1,700 U.S. high school seniors entered the Intel Talent Search, while 1,500 students from more than 40 nations competed in the Intel Science Fair, with one of three $50,000 grand prizes going to CTY alumn Philip Streich, a 16-year-old from Platteville, Wisconsin, whose chemistry project was titled "Determining Carbon Nanotubes' Thermodynamic Solubility: The Missing Link to a Practical Super--material?" Ms. Blewett took 7th place in the Intel Talent Search with her medicine & health project, a multi-year effort focused on multiple sclerosis whose preliminary results the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT is now using to launch their own additional studies. She will be presenting her results to the U.S. congressional bio-medical caucus on June 6th. Early inspiration for Ms. Blewett’s project came from CTY. “CTY gave me my first view of research,” she says. “I still remember when a neuroscientist from Johns Hopkins spoke to our class about his work. He gave me a real understanding of how the scientific process works. The programs provided insight that would be hard to find anywhere else.” Rhodes winners
An environmental scholar and the founder of a philosophical review are among the CTY alums selected as 2007 Rhodes scholars. The Rhodes Scholarships, established in 1902 and widely regarded as among the most prestigious awards in education, were announced in November. Recipients embody “excellence in qualities of mind and in qualities of person which, in combination, offer the promise of effective service to the world in the decades ahead,” according to the Rhodes Trust. Since 2000, 33 CTY alumni have been named Rhodes scholars. Of this year’s crop, more than one mentioned CTY’s pivotal role in helping them achieve their goals. “It was at CTY that the world of ideas first swung open to me, and that I felt invited to take my place in it,” said Amia Srinivasan, a new Rhodes scholar, of her two years in CTY’s Summer Academic Program. Attending Yale as a Philosophy major, Srinivasan, who lives in New Haven, Connecticut, has won national and Yale prizes for her work in ethics, philosophy, and literature, while founding the Yale Philosophy Review. She plans to do the B.Phil. in Philosophy at Oxford. “My two summers at CTY were absolutely pivotal,” Srinivasan said, “for my development as both a thinker and a person.” Fellow Yale senior Whitney Haring-Smith, of Washington, Pennsylvania, shared similar feelings. “CTY nurtured my curiosity early on, and helped me to develop both academically and socially. The experience of living and studying on a college campus during CTY made it easier to transition to college routines when I arrived at Yale years later.” Haring-Smith, a Political Science major, has worked on humanitarian causes for both the U.N. and the U.S. Secretary of Defense, won a Udall Scholarship for environmental leadership, and plans to do a doctorate in Politics at Oxford. Srinivasan and Haring-Smith, along with Jacob Lemieux, Christian Sahner, Maya Shankar, Nicholas Shelly, and Andrew Shipley, will join scholars from 19 countries around the world next October for a two-year stay at the University of Oxford. “We’re enormously proud of these CTY alumni and their achievements,” said Lea Ybarra, executive director of CTY. “They illustrate why it’s so important to identify academic talent early, then develop the abilities of students of great promise to help them reach the highest levels of accomplishment.” ### For more information on: CTY -- http://cty.jhu.edu/about/pressroom/ctyquickfacts.html The Rhodes Scholarship -- http://www.rhodesscholar.org/ Intel Science Talent Search/Science Fair -- http://www.sciserv.org/sts/ or http://www.sciserv.org/isef/ ETS Young Epidemiology Scholars Competition -- http://www.collegeboard.com/yes/ Scripps Spelling Bee -- http://www.spellingbee.com/index.asp USA Today Academic Team -- http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-05-16-high-school-allstars_N.htm ### | 
