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Bartram Trail Senior Earns Academic Honor As St. Johns County's Sunshine State Scholar, She'Ll Face Regional Competition in 2006.

Posted on: Tuesday, 17 January 2006, 18:00 CST

By lisa miller

Thanks to a expansive volunteer history and prodigious knowledge of mathematics and science, Bartram Trail High School senior Felicia Svedlund was recently named the St. Johns County School District's Sunshine State Scholar.

The honor includes a scholarship and advancement to a regional competition where she'll participate in a mathematics and science assessment. The top six regional scholars will then go on to compete for the state title.

Svedlund is ranked third in her class of 509 with a grade point average of 4.74. Her weighted math and science GPAs are both perfect on a 5-point scale. She has qualified as a National Merit semifinalist and has been awarded the title of Advanced Placement Scholar with Distinction.

Svedlund is a member of Bartram's Interact Club and volunteers at the local homeless shelter and in the American Cancer Society's annual Relay for Life. She is an American Youth Character Award recipient and a member of several honor societies. She plans to major in biomedical engineering in college. Svedlund is the daughter of Steven and Shannon Svedlund.

As the county's Sunshine State Scholar, Svedlund receives the fourth annual Elaine Crutchfield Math and Science Scholarship. Crutchfield, who died in 2002, worked for the district for 29 years, serving as both a math and science teacher before being named the district's curriculum coordinator. In recognition for Crutchfield's contributions to education, the curriculum department created the scholarship in her honor, which is presented to the district's Sunshine State Scholar each year.

Other finalists include Kelsey Kempler of Pedro Menendez High School, Elisabeth West of Nease and James Yao of St. Augustine High. lisa.miller@jacksonville.com,(904) 287-0618 ext. 202#quite the testAs Sunshine State Scholar, Felicia Svedlund faces an arduous test of her mathematics and science skills. Here's a sample question from this year's regional test. Problem: Using chemical structures, give two examples of how H-bonding is involved in the structure of protein macromolecules. Be clear on where the R groups are located relative to the backbone within your structure(s). But you do not have to show the full structure for each R group.Solution: There are many H-bonds, so even though each H-bond is worth only 20 kJ/mol, the energies add up to be appreciable. With proteins there can be H- bonds either along the axis of an alpha-helix from the O in a C=O to an H in an N-H further down the axis, or perpendicular to the axis of an extended chain, forming a beta-pleated sheet structure. With the beta-pleated sheet the two polypeptide backbones can be parallel (both going the same direction, N-terminal end toward C-terminal end) or they can be antiparallel.

Source: Florida Times Union

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