The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and cosponsor Scholastic recently presented the first Addiction Science award at the annual Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, the world's largest high-school science fair, Medical News Today reported May 20.

Kapil Vishveshwar Ramachandran, 16, of Westwood High School in Austin, Texas won the award for a project that explored the basic chemical basis of addiction. "The judges were particularly impressed with the winner's enthusiasm and innovative approach to exploring the neurological underpinnings of addiction," said NIDA Director Dr. Nora D. Volkow. "He developed a simple, sensitive, elegant instrument to measure tolerance in fruit flies, and ended up possibly contributing to the knowledge needed to find biological changes at the root of addiction."

Ramachandran received a $2,500 scholarship from Scholastic for his work.

The second-place award went to Ethan Garrett Guinn, 17, of Moore High School in Moore, Okla., for his project, Video Games: The Next Generation's Addiction. The focus of the project was obsessive use of video games. Third place went to Shelby Marie Raye of Manatee High School in Bradenton, Fla., for her project, What's In and What's Out: High Schoolers' Perceptions of Coolness.

"Our second- and third-place winners both took a look at the world around them, used initiative, curiosity, and good science to identify and measure relatively unstudied influences that are going on in the lives of adolescents," said Volkow.