On September 7, Intel celebrated a major milestone in its enduring commitment to education: 10 million teachers have been trained through the Intel Teach program, in turn positively impacting 300 million students worldwide. Through the Intel Teach program, Intel has enabled educators to effectively integrate technology into their lessons to promote problem solving, critical thinking and collaboration – commonly called 21^st century skills – among their students. Intel Teach is just one part of Intel’s $100 million annual investment toward improving the quality of education around the world. Check out this article in U.S. News & World Report highlighting Intel’s achievement, and learn more about the program here.

Teachers, join our global online celebration and share your success stories with Intel Teach here.

This blog post originally appeared on the Society for Science & the Public’s blog: http://societyforscience.typepad.com/ssp/2011/06/ssp-alumnus-terik-daly-continues-the-cycle-of-inspiration.html

One reason SSP has started an alumni program, and encouraged connections through social media sites, such as the SSP alumni group on LinkedIn, is so alumni can continue connecting with and inspiring each other long after the awards have been given and the return flights have landed. Terik Daly (Intel ISEF 2005, 2006, 2007; Intel STS 2007 Semifinalist) is one of the many SSP alumni who reach out to young scientists to help them with their work.

At Intel ISEF, Terik remembers the strong sense of belonging that came with the week-long event. “You have this network that you can connect to, with people who are intelligent and who are engaging and have some of the same interests as you do, and it’s a place where you can really make some friends that last a long time.”

Terik Daly by his project at Intel ISEF 2007

When he moved to Provo, Utah to attend Brigham Young University, Terik got involved in the local science fair by assisting in organizing judges, helping with teacher workshops, and mentoring students to help the winners of the Utah fairs do well at Intel ISEF. “He’s really good at being able to look at a project and say ‘this is how you make it better,’” says Lisa Clarke, Central Utah Science and Engineering Fair Manager. “He’s really good at helping them get it to the next level.”

This year, Terik mentored two of the Intel ISEF 2011 Finalists, Ryan Baker and Jane Cox. Ryan did a project on wind power and Jane studied meteors, which is what Terik studied in high school and continues to work on as a geology student. He also plans to pursue a Ph.D. in planetary sciences. Ryan won a second place special award from GE Energy and Jane’s project received Best of Category and the European Union Contest for Young Scientists award, which includes a trip to Europe to exhibit her project. “It was nice to see how helping students who are already so motivated and so talented can help bring them to that next level,” Terik says, adding that SSP’s programs had such a strong impact on him that “I’m invested in helping other students…experience [Intel] ISEF and have the kind of inspiring experience I had.”

This blog post originally appeared on Society for Science & the Public’s blog: http://societyforscience.typepad.com/ssp/2011/06/ryan-harrison-breaking-the-mold-predicting-proteins-and-inspiring-youth.html

In 2005, Ryan Harrison won fifth place at the Intel Science Talent Search for developing an algorithm that predicts the structure of proteins. Previously, Rosetta, a leading algorithm designed to predict protein structure, could not account for how pH affects proteins. Thanks to Ryan, who initiated this modification of Rosetta, we can now predict this, which may help in the production and tailoring of drugs. Since Ryan’s departure from the lab, the project has been continued by a grad student.

While Ryan found the experience very rewarding, he notes that often groups, such as African Americans, are under-represented in science competitions and scientific professions. “When I was growing up, I didn’t see very many people that looked like me doing science and engineering,” he says. “I think the predominate reason for this (lack of diversity) is lack of access and exposure.”

Ryan Harrison (Intel STS 2005) in the lab

He credits his own success to the good education and access to science mentors through The Ingenuity Project, a program that takes students in Baltimore City and helps them to compete for the highest honors. He says his work with them, along with the motivation to be a Finalist in Intel STS, lead to his success at Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a degree in Biomedical Engineering, and to his current work as a Biological Physics DPhil student in the NIH-Oxford Graduate Partnership Program, a collaborative doctoral training program between the National Institutes of Health and the University of Oxford.

Ryan has also taken that knowledge and applied it to good causes, such as Engineers Without Borders, where he helped improve access to water for people in Guatemala. “As an engineering student, you’re supposed to build things. That’s what an engineer does,” he says. “So why not build something useful.” He also currently does education outreach by serving on the advisory board of Cogito, a resource for students interested in science.

Additionally, a few times a year, Ryan makes a point to return home to Baltimore City Schools. In November 2010, he spoke with 6th and 7th graders at MATHS Charter School about his work, and science in general. He uses models of proteins that they can see and handle, and emphasizes how before scientific facts were facts, someone had to discover them. “There is kind of a disconnect between what you read in a textbook and how those discoveries were actually made,” Ryan says. He tries to restore that disconnect by explaining that he has helped make scientific discoveries and wants to use this as a source to empower students to pursue discovery themselves by demonstrating “that just because you don’t see people that look like you in the sciences, doesn’t mean that you don’t belong or that you can’t do it.”

Watch as the finalists at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, a program of the Society for Science & the Public, answer one simple question: What is curiosity?

Students hailed all the way from Vietnam to Los Angeles to compete in this year’s Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, a program for the Society for Science & the Public. Check out this video to see the Vietnamese finalists present their projects!