Girls on Top - Google Science Fair Picks Three Female Winners

While the word goes gaga over yesterday's release of the final Harry Potter film, let's give some love to the winners of the 2011 Google Science Fair -- all young women who are role models at least the equal of Hermione Granger.

The Grand Prize recipient and winner in the age 17-18 is Shree Bose from Fort Worth, Texas, for her research into reducing the resistance of ovarian cancer cells to certain chemotherapy drugs. She was awarded a $50,000 scholarship, a trip to the Galápagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer and an internship at CERN

The winner in the age 15-16 category is Naomi Shah of Portland, Oregon, for her work on the impact of indoor air quality on the lung health of asthma patients.

The winner in the 13-14 category is Lauren Hodge of Dallastown, Pennsylvania, who tested the effect of various marinades in reducing the the level of potentially harmful carcinogens in grilled chicken.

Shah and Hodge each received $25,000 scholarships and internships at Google and LEGO.

From the Google Science Fair blog:

[T]he unifying elements of all three young women were their intellectual curiosity, their tenaciousness and their ambition to use science to find solutions to big problems. They examined complex problems and found both simple solutions that can be implemented by the general public--like changing your cooking habits or removing toxins from your home--as well as more complex solutions that can be addressed in labs by doctors and researchers, such as Shree's groundbreaking discovery, which could have wider implications for cancer research.

The three young women were chosen by a panel of judges out of a field of 15 finalists flown to Google headquarters in Mountain View, California for the Science Fair and presentation of their projects. More than 7500 projects were submitted by 10,000 students from 90 countries.

The fact that the top three winners of Google's first-ever science fair were all female confirmed that -- when given the opportunity -- women can excel in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers. The selection of female winners was purely coincidental, according to the New York Times:

Promoting women in science was not an explicit goal of Google's and gender did not play a role in the judges' decisions, said Vint Cerf, a Google Science Fair judge and the company's chief Internet evangelist.

"But I was secretly happy to see that happen, because for ages men have dominated the science field, and in many cases women who have done excellent work have been ignored," Mr. Cerf said in an interview.

Google has made a conscious effort to recruit women in a male-dominated field. Hired in 1999 as Google's first female engineer,  Marissa Mayer has become one of the most influential women in cyberspace. The Science Fair is one of the company's education projects to promote student interest in science; and now with three highly visible female winners as role models for other aspiring scientists and engineers, Google may be helping to close the math-science gender gap for good.