MDI student selected in science competition

BAR HARBOR – Bradley Witham, a senior at Mount Desert Island High School, has been selected among 20 New England high school students as a semifinalist in the Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology.

Witham is the only student from Maine. His entry is a computer program that can aid researchers in identifying genes that may be associated with a disease or biological process that has been mapped to specific regions of the genome in a laboratory mouse – a process known as positional candidate gene analysis.

Witham wrote the software for the program during his 10-week involvement in Jackson Laboratory’s Summer Student Program earlier this year.

A complete list of semifinalists was posted Oct. 24 on the Siemens Foundation’s Web site, www.siemens-foundation.org.

Regional finalists will be posted on Monday, Nov. 3. National finals will be held in Washington, D.C., Dec. 5-8. The first-place winner receives a $100,000 college scholarship.

For more information on Jackson Laboratory’s Summer Student Program, visit www.jax.org.