S.D. Area Has 4 Winners in Science Contest

Thirteen young California students were among 300 named Tuesday as honors winners in the Westinghouse science contest, the nation’s oldest high school science talent search.

The competition invites entries from seniors around the nation, but is typically dominated by New York schools.

This year, 133 honors winners came from New York state, and 64 of them came from two high schools: the Bronx High School for Science and Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High.

By contrast, the 49 high schools in Los Angeles had only one winner: Bill Li-Chien Tsai, 18, who is enrolled in a special math and science program at Van Nuys High School. San Diego County high schools produced four winners, two of those from the San Diego Unified School District.

“The high schools in New York are tremendously competitive, and from the chancellor (of the school district) on down to the principals and teachers, they take this very seriously,” said Dorothy Schriver, program director for Science Services in Washington, a group that runs the competition for the Westinghouse Educational Foundation.

“The New York schools encourage their students and they set them up with scientists to work in the labs. We haven’t found that attitude in California or elsewhere,” she said.

To be eligible, a student must undertake an independent research project and submit a detailed description of the project and the findings. There were more than 1,000 entries this year, Schriver said, and next week Westinghouse will announce the 40 national winners who will share in more than $89,000 in scholarship aid.

In recent years, according to contest officials, entries from California have fallen off. Last year, the state had eight honors winners, although none of the 40 national winners.

“The only reason I can give is that we have not immersed ourselves in the Westinghouse science project,” said Paul Possemato, director of the senior high division in Los Angeles. “We have not had many entrants, and some of that may be a lack of publicity for it on our part.”

Meanwhile, San Diego County educators were pleased with their students’ showing. The county’s four winners were Michael John Topolovac, 18, of Torrey Pines High School in Del Mar, whose paper concerned “Laminar Extension and Transitional Location in a Heated Boundary Layer,” and Brett David Shurman, 17, La Jolla Country Day School, who studied “Subcellular Distribution and Partial Characterization of Phosphatidylinositol Phosphate Phosphatase.”

Also, Alan John Hu, 17, of La Jolla High School, whose paper concerned “Mathematical Selection of the Optimum Uniform Partition Search,” and Lance Elliot Holman, 17, of Patrick Henry High School who investigated “Clinical Diagnosis of Hemophilia A.”

San Diego County educators speculated that one reason their students did well in the competition may have been the area’s abundance of researchers, notably at bioengineering and high-tech electronics firms and such institutions as UC San Diego, Scripps Clinic and Salk Institute.

“We live in a science-oriented community,” said Phil Gay, the San Diego Unified School District’s basic education consultant in science. Science buffs are stimulated by “the research institutions, the universities that are here, the next-door neighbor scientists that they can talk to.”

Gay noted that San Diego Unified’s two winners--Hu and Topolovac--were also dual sweepstakes winners in the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair in April. As a result, each received a $2,500 scholarship from the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater Scholarship Program, which is sponsored by the San Diego Hall of Science. Holman won the first-place award in medical science in the same fair, Gay said.

In Los Angeles County, there were two honors winners from Alhambra High, a school that has regularly won the top honors in the county and state science fairs.

“We have an excellent science faculty. And the kids get a lot of support from home to produce these research papers,” said Frank Cano, school principal. “Over the last seven years, winning in these contests has become a matter of pride and tradition at our school,” he added.

Tsai, the one Los Angeles winner, lives in Northridge, but attends the math and science “magnet school” at Van Nuys High, one of three such programs in the district.

“He’s a dynamite student who has taken advantage of every opportunity,” said Carole Spence, administrator of the magnet program, noting that Tsai has taken extra classes at Cal State Northridge, has participated in Saturday science programs at Caltech in Pasadena and has attended the Thatcher summer science camp in Ojai.

Contributing to this story was Times staff writer Keay Davidson