Houston: Intel Corporation has awarded Indian American student, Ryna Karnik, a $ 50,000 scholarship and third place in the Intel Science Talent Search - the United States' most prestigious high school science competition.

Six other Indian American students from different parts of the country were amongst the list of 40 finalists for this week-long and the most gruelling science competition.

Karnik, 17, a student of Oregon Episcopal School in Portland, Oregon, was awarded for her patent-pending design method for constructing microchips, which may save developers time and money when creating and testing prototype semiconductor chips.

She submitted an Intel STS project in engineering describing a method of constructing microchips using a focused ion beam (FIB) as a "molecular pencil" to directly "write" transistors onto silicon wafers. This is a departure from traditional methods, which involve photolithography.

Using her patent-pending technique, she created a working transistor. Applications of her findings could also save microchip developers a great amount of time and money.

Karnik, whose immigrant parents Milind and Parizad Karnik hail from Mumbai, plans to study pre-medical at Stanford and eventually complete an MD and PhD programme. She hopes to become a medical researcher.

The other Indian-American students in the list include Sean Dilip Raj, Divya Nettimi, Rohini Subhadra Rau-Murthy, Neha Chauhan, Gaurav Subhash Thakur and Arjun Anand Suri.

Sean Dilip Raj, 18, of Sugar Land, Texas, studied blood stem cell therapy and its potential as a treatment for heart failure in his Intel STS project in medicine and health.

India born Divya Nettimi, 17, of Oakton, Virginia, developed a method of calculating theoretically the rate at which myosin, a molecular biomotor, reacts with adenosine triphosphate (ATP), an energy source, and drives muscle contraction for her project in biochemistry.

Rohini Subhadra Rau-Murthy, 17, of Yorktown Heights, New York, entered a behavioural and social sciences project that studied stereotypes pertaining to math and gender-related performance, primarily the long-held view males are better at math than females, and its effect upon actual math test scores.

This classical dancer claims to be one of the first to test two major theories simultaneously at the high school level. Her study suggests that women perform better than expected on math tests when they do not remind themselves they are the gender traditionally viewed as the poorer performers.

Neha Chauhan, 17, of Staten Island, New York identified potential new preventive and therapeutic roles of dietary polyphenolic and flavonoid compounds in preventing Alzheimer's disease for her project in medicine and health.

Gaurav Subhash Thakur of Rockville, Maryland, studied generalized factorial functions for his project in mathematics

Thakur, 17, analysed the "powerfactorial" function PFn (x), obtained by iterating powers of successive numbers.

Arjun Anand Suri, 17, of Fresno, California, was named a finalist for his biochemistry project, researching the effect of tyrosine sulfation, a process in protein synthesis, on the binding of a molecule with a cell receptor.

They will each receive a $ 5,000 scholarship award, and an Intel+ CentrinoTM mobile technology-based notebook computer.