SSHS senior is Intel semifinalist

Some students go sledding on a snow day. Others catch up on sleep. But for 17-year-old Ben Hawriluk, a recent snow day was a day of celebration, when the South Side High School senior found out he had been selected as a semifinalist in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search.

“I was surprised — and relieved ….” Hawriluk said after he heard the news from South Side Principal Dr. Carol Burris, who called his home on Jan. 12, when school was closed because of a snowstorm. “I’m excited to represent South Side in such an incredible competition … and I’m really excited about the opportunity to compete for a chance to become a finalist.”


Hawriluk designed a bioinformatics project that combined math, computer science and biology to study pancreatic cancer. He compared the genetic makeup of people with the cancer with those without it, and created computational tools to identify certain portions of the human genome that play a role in predisposing some people to the disease.

“Medicine is heading in a different direction,” he said. “With the advent of inexpensive genetic screening, doctors will inevitably have the tools to practice specific and individualized medicine. Genetic data will be useful when doctors make decisions. By analyzing genetic data, doctors can get a sense of a patient’s risk for a particular type of disease.”

Both of Hawriluk’s maternal grandparents died of cancer, which he said inspired him to research the disease. At first he wasn’t sure what type of cancer he wanted to focus on for the Intel competition, but Dr. Robert J. Klein, his mentor at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Center, suggested that he study cancer of the pancreas.

Hawriluk said that the project took him eight weeks, and he worked for about 45 hours a week in Klein’s laboratory at Memorial Sloan-Kettering over the summer. He was in and out of the lab periodically since the summer as well.

“Dr. Klein was incredibly influential,” Hawriluk said. “The graduate students in my lab were supportive, too. The support and expertise of Mr. [Herb] Weiss, my science research teacher at South Side, has played a critical role in the success of my research.”