Raghavendra Ramachanderan (17), who recently completed his class XII school-leaving exam from the CBSE-affiliated St. John’s International Residential School in Chennai, won the ‘Best of Category’ award for chemistry ($3000) and the SIYSS Dudley Herschbach award for the third best project worldwide at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) 2012 — the world’s largest high school science research competition — held in Pittsburg, USA between May 13-18.

The SIYSS award entitles Raghavendra to an all-expenses paid trip to Sweden to participate in the world’s largest youth science seminar, and includes an invitation to the Nobel prize ceremony in Stockholm in December this year. He was among six students chosen to represent India at ISEF 2012 in which 1,500 young scientists from 446 affiliated science fairs in 68 countries worldwide, competed for top honours.

For Raghavendra, the ‘Best of Category’ chemistry award is a second; his first win was for a project on drug synthesis at ISEF 2011. However, he is the first Indian student to get the Dudley Herschback award. His latest groundbreaking project enables energy conservation through the use of visible light de-oxygenation — a process by which oxygen atoms are removed from alcoholic substrates.

“Most fuels when burnt are oxidised into low energy compounds. My process uses sunlight to convert them back into high energy compounds. Given that sunlight is abundant in India and all reaction components in my experiment are reusable, the project has immense potential,” he explains.

A voracious reader of science books and journals, Raghavendra who is based in Bangalore but completed schooling in Chennai, discovered his passion for chemistry when he was in class IX, and took a gap year after his class X boards to work on chemistry projects. When he rejoined school for higher secondary education, he simultaneously pursued research at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore for a few months and in August 2011, as a class XII student, began working on his prize-winning project at the University of Regensburg in Germany.

Two years of strategic research and hard work has paid off. He has been recently selected by the Google Science Fair as one of 15 worldwide finalists, with the final event to be held at Google headquarters in California on July 23.

Adept at combining formal study with intensive research, Raghavendra has his future mapped out. “I plan to complete an undergraduate programme in chemistry parallely with a Masters in biochemistry in an accelerated programme of the University of Regensburg within two years, and pursue research as a career. It’s what I do best,” says this brilliant young scientist who is clearly set to go places.

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)