2 Southland Students Win Top Science Prizes : Education: California has its best showing in years in a prestigious high school academic competition.

Two Southern California students are among the top 10 winners of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious high school academic competition, it was announced Monday.

Second place in the 49-year-old competition, known as the Nobel Prize of high school science, went to David Ruchien Liu, 16, a senior at Polytechnic High School in Riverside. He will receive a $15,000 scholarship.

Sixth place, which includes a $7,500 grant, went to Royce Yung-Tze Peng, 17, a senior at Rolling Hills High School in Rolling Hills Estates. Jennifer Lynn Ryder, 17, a senior at Edison High School in Fresno, was named first alternate to the top 10 winners.

This year’s top prize went to Matthew Peter Headrick, 16, of Chicago, who will receive a $20,000 scholarship for his investigation in molecular genetics. The awards were presented at a banquet.

In all, California captured three of the top 12 spots (including two alternates), equaling for the first time the number of top awards given to students from New York, which in recent years has dominated the competition. It is the first time in four years that California has placed anyone in the top 10.

Only five other states were represented in the top 12 positions--Virginia with two winners, Illinois with one winner, Maryland and Washington state with one each and Texas with an alternate winner.

“I’m very grateful,” Bill Honig, California’s superintendent of public instruction, said in a telephone interview. “California has been pushing hard (for improvements in science and math education) for the past five or six or seven years. . . . We’re nowhere near where we want to be or need to be but at least we’re headed in the right direction.”

A significant number of past winners have reached the top of their fields. Of the 1,960 winners in the Science Talent Search since its inception in 1942, five have gone on to win Nobel Prizes; two have won Fields Medals for distinguished work in mathematics, and eight have been awarded MacArthur Foundation Fellowships for research in the physical and life sciences. In addition, 26 former winners have been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, and three to the National Academy of Engineering.

This year, 1,431 high school seniors from schools across the country entered the competition, which is sponsored by the Westinghouse Electric Corp. and conducted by Science Service Inc., a Washington-based nonprofit organization that is engaged in furthering public understanding of science and is publisher of the award-winning weekly magazine Science News.

Forty finalists, 11 females and 29 males, were selected for a five-day, all-expenses-paid trip to Washington. Final selection of the top 10 winners and two alternates was made through a series of interviews by a board of judges, chaired by J. Richard Gott, a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University and a former Westinghouse winner. Since 1963, every Westinghouse finalist has been interviewed and judged by Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and a professor at UC Berkeley.

The students who enter the competition are not ordinary students. Many are extraordinarily gifted and spend long after-school hours in laboratories and in summer science programs on college campuses.

Liu, whose parents were born in China, said he became intrigued with science as a child.

“I just wanted to know how the world works,” he said.

By age 7, he was concocting “kitchen experiments,” one of which blew a chandelier off the ceiling of his parents’ Riverside home.

Like those of many participants in the Westinghouse competition, Liu’s parents are themselves scientists--his father a UCLA-trained aerospace engineer, his mother a UCLA-trained physicist and professor at UC Riverside.

Liu’s project, which won second place, was an original computer program that simulates the many steps the brain goes through in processing visual images. It took him 1 1/2 years to complete, working an average of 14 to 15 hours a week.

“During school, sometimes I spent no more than two hours on the computer at home each week. But during the summer, there were days when my mom clocked me doing more than 12 hours a day,” he said.

In his free time, Liu said, he “relaxes” by running the school newspaper, playing the violin, painting, and competing in a host of local, state, national and international competitions--not only science, but in mathematics, social sciences and English.

He credits his parents, not with pushing him toward science but with giving him the resources to pursue his interests.

Liu has been accepted at Harvard and is waiting to hear from Stanford, Caltech and MIT.

First-place winner Headrick of University of Chicago Laboratory Schools High School used molecular-genetics techniques with blue-green algae to isolate for the first time the gene necessary for converting nitrogen from air into ammonia, a process essential for the synthesis of amino acids and all life.

Peng, the sixth-place winner from Rancho Palos Verdes, also has been accepted at Harvard and is waiting to hear from Stanford and Caltech. His mother has an undergraduate degree in science and now sells real estate; his father is a professor of pathology at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

Peng’s project, which began in summer school at the Research Science Institute at George Washington University and continued with the help of former Westinghouse winner Paul Corneil at TRW, involved mathematics.

Peng set out to determine whether two planar surfaces, each with a smooth edge on a section of its boundary, could be bent without stretching so that two edges could be matched exactly and join. Although many areas need to be researched further, he sees applications for tailors sewing irregular cloth or automotive and aerospace manufacturers joining irregular metal shapes.

Ryder of Fresno designed and built a tool to separate strands of DNA, which she found performed better than some commercial units. She has won first place in two other scientific competitions, plays the guitar, swims and participates in soccer and cross-country running. . She hopes to major in biochemistry at Yale or Princeton.

In some cases, the young scientists have turned personal experiences into scientific inquiries.

Tae Hoon Kim of Clovis, another of the 40 finalists, immigrated to this country when he was in the sixth grade and is now completing his senior year at Bullard High School in Fresno. He first got interested in science, he said, when a minister at a missionary church preached against the theory of human evolution. “I was unable to accept his ideas,” Kim said. “But I still believe in God--at least I think I do. The biggest change it (science) has brought me was skepticism. And that, I think is good, because with skepticism, you can begin to find answers.”

Just being together for five days with some of the other best young minds in science has already had a profound effect on many of the Westinghouse competitors, most of whom say they hope to pursue careers in science.

“I used to go to bed very early so I’ll be ready for the next day’s activities,” Liu said. “I’ve changed my philosophy. I now stay up as late as I can, because I may never see many of these people again.”

If the past is any indication, however, he will be hearing from many of his colleagues at scientific meetings for years to come.