Teenager Wins Intel Science Fair: Grows Algae under Bed to Make Bio-Fuel

A 17-year-old girl from Colorado Springs, Colo. won first prize at the Intel Science Talent Search, an elite science fair for growing a population of algae under her bed that produces so much oil it could be used to make cheap bio-fuel.

"I was trying to use guided evolution, so artificial selection, to isolate populations of algae cells with abnormally high oil content," Sara Volz told NBC News. She won the coveted first prize spot at the fair on Tuesday evening, which included a $100,000 scholarship.

The use of algae to create bio-fuel has been of interest to many researchers in the green energy community, but the challenge has been to get the plants to produce oil at scale cheaply enough to compete with petroleum-based fuel.

Volz's said her discovery might provide the answer to this challenge given its low cost to make these algae populations. It relies on an herbicide that kills algae cells with low levels of an enzyme crucial to making oil.

"The idea is, if you introduce this chemical, you kill everything with really low oil production," she explained. "What you are left with is a population of cells with very high oil production."

Second-place honors and $75,000 went to Jonah Kallenbach, 17, of Ambler, Pa., whose bioinformatics study breaks new ground in predicting protein binding for drug therapy, Intel said. Jonah solved an open problem first posed several years ago, and his work suggests a new path to drug design by targeting a protein's disordered regions. His research may open doors to treatment for diseases, such as breast cancer, ovarian cancer and tuberculosis.

More than 1,700 high school seniors entered the talent search, but only 40 made the cut as finalists. They gathered at the National Geographic Society in Washington D.C. to display and present the research.

Past finalists have included seven future Nobel Prize winners, five National Medal of Science honorees and 11 MacArthur "geniuses," according to Intel officials.