Meredith Paloma Lehmann can truly call herself extraordinary. So out of the ordinary is she, in fact, that she has managed to distinguish herself from 1,839 others, to be exact. The La Jolla High School student is one of 40 high school seniors from around the country that have been selected as finalists in the Intel Science Talent Search (ISTS) 2012, America’s oldest and most prestigious pre-college science competition. Lehmann made it through the semi-final rounds, for which 300 competitors were plucked from the thousands of applicants to advance in the competition. Now, she will go on to the final round in Washington, D.C. to compete for the grand prize: $100,000 from the Intel Foundation. Lehmann’s project, “The Spread of Epidemics on the U.S. Transportation Network: The Role of Air and Long Distance Auto Travel,” has earned her a place among the other finalists who will vie for prizes totaling more than $630,000. During the final judgment rounds from March 8-13, they will also get the chance to meet with national leaders, including politicians and preeminent scientists. Lehmann’s project took her on an exploration of the role of air and long distance auto travel on the spread of epidemics. By researching the mechanisms by which diseases are spread, she reexamined the popularly held notion that epidemics spread primarily through airports near population hubs. In Lehmann’s simulated model, she determined that “the main differences caused by travel occur because of the time it takes to seed each county with infected individuals, and that after counties are seeded, each epidemic runs largely as an epidemic without travel between counties.” She concluded that long-distance travel by auto, not air, is “the main instrument of initial epidemic spread.” “In my simulated world, no preferred epidemic pathways occur, and this may also be true of the real world,” she said in an email. “When outbreaks of infectious diseases occur, people often reconsider travel plans and their increased vulnerability, but are more likely to cancel plane trips than car or train trips. It might be wise to reconsider that, given that auto travel appears to be a more likely mode of epidemic spread.” The project, she said, has been a labor of love of hers for a while. Her fascination with epidemics, in fact, started all the way back in eighth grade. Required to submit a project for the science fair along with every other eighth-grade student, she started looking at the spread of diseases. “At the time, I was vaguely interested in epidemics because my teacher had taught a short unit on severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a respiratory disease that gained international attention in a 2003 outbreak that caused nearly 1,000 deaths worldwide, and the avian influenza (H5N1), which presented a threat because although it could not be transmitted between humans, such an adaptation would make the bird flu a global threat,” she said. Her interest in the subject, she said, was fueled by the discovery of two resources — one an online differential equations textbook describing how to use a susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) epidemic model to predict epidemics and the other a 2004 Nature article that described recently rediscovered mortality data for 47 American cities during the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic. Following the instructions in the textbook, she calculated the evolution of two weeks of rubella, measles and mumps by hand, an exercise, she said, that “made the workings of the model easily comprehensible to me.” Current events, she said — specifically the advent of the swine flu — also had a hand in bringing her to her recent research, and by learning the programming code for prediction models, she had a valuable project in hand. Ultimately, she said, it was the advice of her older brother Dylan, who told her how he wished he had joined some LJHS classmates in competing in the Westinghouse Talent Search — ISTS’s predecessor — that convinced her that her research was worthy of the lofty competition. “With all the work I had put into understanding how epidemics spread, I felt that I had an advantage, an opportunity and an obligation to contribute to the science,” she said. “This brought me to my Intel STS project. Because I had already studied epidemics, I had something of a foundation for the knowledge I would need, and I was used to the challenges associated with writing code for my simulations and of doing research in general.” The project was not without its snags, she said, but has provided a priceless self-induced education. “I have greatly enjoyed the process of doing the research,” she said, “even with the late nights I’ve spent debugging and the days of frustration as I clear all my other tasks before I can begin to identify the problem with my code.” As for her competition, Lehmann said she has nothing but respect for her fellow competitors. “I am very excited about the final event in Washington, D.C.,” she said. “I am really looking forward to seeing all of the other projects there. I have read some of the other project descriptions and I feel both honored and humbled to be among such an accomplished group of young scientists.”