Jeff Yang + The WSJ + 2011

Monday, January 02, 2012

I guess it's that time of year for the best and worsts of 2011, and while I was only a 1/2 time blogger last year, yup - mine's coming too - but since you should be reading more eruditic people (other than myself of course and yes, eruditic isn't actually a word) -- here's a sampling of Jeff Yang's "The Best in Asia and Asian American 2011".

Smart young women: A trio of Asian American teens singlehandedly — triplehandedly? — flipped the script on stereotypes of females in science, while scoring major wins in the fight against the most insidious of killer diseases. Seventeen-year-old Shree Bose of Fort Worth, TAXwon the $50,000 grand prize in the inaugural Google Science Fair with a project that solves a weakness in current chemotherapies for ovarian cancer, while 17-year-old Angela Zhang of Cupertino, CA scored the $100,000 top award in the 2011 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology for designing a nanoparticle that could potentially be the “Swiss Army knife” of cancer drug delivery. Meanwhile, 16-year old Amy Chyao of Richardson, TX sat next to the First Lady at the State of the Union in January, while basking in the President’s praise of her as the face of America’s STEM-studies future; Chyao won last year’s Intel Science and Engineering Fair with her own groundbreaking nanotech anti-tumor treatment. Cancer better hope these three don’t team up.
Read it in full here.