Prashant Ranganathan has emerged winner in the world’s largest pre-college science competition in the environment engineering category for his work on biodegradation of pesticides. Prashant is among the 20 high schools students from various parts of the country who participated in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair held in the US. More than 1700 students across the world had participated in the event.
Prashant Ranganathan is a student of Carmel Junior College in Jamshedpur. His project titled ‘Biodegradation of Chlorpyrifos using native bacteria’ is aimed at helping farmers to biodegrade the harmful pesticides.
In all, Four Indian-Americans received top awards in various categories. Indian American Pratik Naidu has won an award in the category of computational biology and bioinformatics. Other Indian-American winners include Adam Nayak who has won in earth and environmental sciences, Karthik Yegnesh in Mathematics and Rahul Subramaniam in the microbiology category.