Each year, INTEL honors 300 of America's high school seniors for their excellence in science and names them semifinalists of the Intel Science Talent Search (STS). Five students from the Syosset School District were included in the 300 students.

Emily Breidbart's project was entitled Comparison of Parental and Sibling Perceptions of the Sibling Relationship in Families of Children with Autism and Families of Typically Developing Children. She wanted to see the differences between the sibling relationships involving a child with autism and those involving typically developing children. She also studied the parental perceptions of the relationship and if they were more accurate in one family or in the other.

Breidbart sent surveys, called the Sibling Relationship Questionnaire, to 50 families - One survey was distributed to the sibling and one to the parent. The distribution was 25 families with an autistic child and 25 families with typically developing children.

"I analyzed these surveys on a scale that a professor from Denver gave me and I found that the relationship does differ between the two groups," said Breidbart. "The child with autism is a lot less nurturing of the sibling than in the parallel relationship. They have very low scores for nurturance and in the parallel, the sibling of a child with autism has a very high level of nurturance of the child. The sibling of a child with autism was being very nurturing toward his brother or sister but was receiving very little back."

From her research, Breidbart gathered that the sibling of a child with autism plays more of a parental role in the sibling's life. "Therapists and psychologists who work with the families, should really work on really making the sibling less of a parent and more of a sibling," said Breidbart. "They should not play such a dominating role in the child's life and be more of a brother or sister. The sibling of a child with autism would give in to the brother or sister so they did not cause a fight or bother the child with autism."

A positive result that Breidbart found was that the love in the relationship with the child with autism is no different than the warmth in the relationship with the typically developing child. "It is thought that children with autism can't show affection or love, but the brothers and sisters of the children with autism really fell that their bother/sister loves them," said Breidbart. "This was very interesting. Even though they can't show love in the same way, the brothers and sisters really did feel that there is something there."

Since eighth grade, Breidbart has worked at Variety Child Learning Center in Syosset and in eighth grade she did a report on autism in her English class. That is how she became so passionate about autism.

In tenth grade, she also started working at the Genesis School in Plainview, a school for autistic children.

Breidbart, who will attend Cornell University the fall and major in human development, worked with Dr. David Celiberti, director of training and research at the Genesis School and the sister school located in Staten Island.

"Before I even started the research, autism was a very important part of my life," said Breidbart. "I really wanted to help the families because they are the most important."

Joshua Ruderman entitled his project Spectroscopy in Orion's Belt: Discovery of New Stars. "It was a data-analysis programming on a computer," said Ruderman. "I was looking at a lot of stars and identifying which ones are young stars from the group. I compared their density to other regions and made a catalog of the stars identifying their spectroclass and ones that were young."

Ruderman got the idea for his project from his mentor Professor Frederick Walter from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The stars that Ruderman found were never catalogued as young stars and his research project was unique, as it was very independent. "This was mostly independent research since astronomy is not a large research field," said Ruderman, who is finished with his part of the research, but believes it will be used as a graduate student project.

"I am very excited to be named a semi-finalist," said Ruderman, who is going to Stanford and studying mechanical or electrical engineering.

Rebecca Schoer was also named a semi-finalist for her project entitled Gene Expression Profiling Reveals Novel Pathways Angiogenesis.

"I used a new technology to measure expression levels of each gene simultaneously and used that to look at the patterns of gene expression in blood vessel formation and tumors," said Schoer. "The blood vessels basically feed the tumors. Some genes were already known to be turned on and expressed to make these blood vessels and I discovered new genes that were involved in blood vessel formation."

Schoer, who worked with her mentor Dr. Mittal Vivek from Cold Spring Harbor Lab, says there is more research to be done and she will continue to work on this in the future.

Schoer, who has not committed to a specific college yet, does know that she wants to study biology with a focus on molecular biology and genetics.

Also named as semi-finalists, and unavailable for comment were Kevin Miu for his work on Adaptive Topographical Handwriting Recognition Utilizing Eight Directional Codes and David Tobias for his project entitled Investigation of the Material Properties of Electrochromic WO3 Thin Films.