A 17-year-old girl named Mary Masterman has outshined 1700 contestants to win a science talent competition in the United States. She was awarded a 100000 dollars worth of scholarship.

Mary Masterman is a a senior at Westmore High School in Oklahoma City who was named of the annual Intel Science Talent Search. She was awarded a scholarship worth 100,000 dollars for her performance.

She earned the grand prize for building an inexpensive yet accurate spectrograph that identifies the “fingerprints” of different molecules. The competition involved 1700 high school seniors across the United States.

Spectrographs measure wave lengths and are used in research such as astronomy and medicine and in industry.

They can cost as much as $100,000, but Mary’s invention is made of lenses, a laser, aluminum tubing and a camera which cost less than $1,000, according to Intel. Mary said said she has been interested in science since she was at a very young age.

She credits her parents for encouraging her to pursue her passion of being a scientist.The Intel’s director of education, Brenda Musilli, said he is amused to have seen Mary build the invention at a very young age.

He said he his happy to see Mary as one of the Top young scientist who is doing breaking-edge research in total.

Mary stated that she is yet to decide where she will be studying for undergraduate but she is working towards becoming a physicist or chemist.