64th Annual STS (2004-2005)
Finalists
Ryan Marques Harrison

MARYLAND
Ryan Marques Harrison, 17, of Baltimore, submitted a bioinformatics and genomics project to the Intel Science Talent Search, which he believes will open new possibilities in the field of computational proteomics, the study of proteins expressed by the genome of a cell. He developed and implemented pH-sensitive protein region modeling in Rosetta, an algorithm that predicts the structure of proteins. Of the nearly one million proteins encoded in the genes recently sequenced by the Human Genome Project, the structure and function of over 95 percent of them are unknown. Many are believed to have pH-sensitive regions that are fundamental to their structure and function. Ryan's work extends Rosetta's modeling capabilities and could play a role in applications of proteomics ranging from biomolecular engineering to drug delivery systems. A published poet and a trumpet player, Ryan attends Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. He is a volunteer at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, and, in addition to awards for science and poetry, he earned the Outward Bound Youth Leadership award. The son of Robert and Sharon Harrison, he hopes to study engineering and economics at Johns Hopkins.