Jin Pan never participated in science fairs. When he finally did, he won big. 

Of the 1,839 students who entered Intel's Science Talent Search, the Gunn High School senior is one of only 40 who have made it to the final round, and one of three from the Bay Area.

Intel's Mark Pettinger and Julie Dunkle—with an entourage of reporters—surprised Pan in his engineering class on Wednesday to recognize him in front of his classmates.

Pan, the second finalist from Gunn since 1998, won a free trip to Washington, D.C. and $7,500. He'll spend five days in D.C. with other finalists where he will showcase his project to senators, congressmen, and Nobel laureates—and meet President Obama.

He'll be joined by fellow Santa Clara County students Alissa Zhang of Saratoga High School, and Saurabh Sharan of Bellarmine Preparatory School, who were the other two students to make it to the finalists' level. Zhang's research was coming up with a a highly reliable diabetes test that uses tears or urine, rather than a blood test requiring a finger prick, Dunkle said. Sharan was chosen for his computer science project titled "Parameter Free Graph Based Nuclear Segmentation in Cellular Images Using Morphological Cues."

There may be some high-level hob-nobbing in Washington in store for the teens, but it won't be all fun and games. The finalists will go through four grueling rounds of quizzing on any math or science subject. 

"That's the most fun part," joked Dunkle, Intel's U.S. education project manager. Finalists like Pan, according to Dunkle, go on to become Nobel Prize winners and leaders in science. 

The winner of the competition will receive $100,000. Last year, Bay Area resident Evan O'Dorney of Danville took the top prize for a mathematics project comparing two ways to estimate the square root of an integer, which contest officials said could have applications in mechanical design, quantum mechanics and cryptography.

Pan's project was in the bioinformatics and genomics category and titled, “A Novel Protein Translation Kinetics Model Supports the Ribosomal Pause Theory.” When a cell's ribosomes creates proteins, they don't translate the mRNA sequence in a smooth fashion, Pan explained. Messenger RNA—that is, mRNA—is the code the ribosome must "read" to make a protein.

"It speeds up and it slows down, and there's all sorts of pauses," he said, "And my project supports the idea that these pauses are beneficial to protein expression."

The implications? New and faster ways to design vaccines, inoculate against viruses like HIV, and model proteins using computers. 

Before attending Gunn, Pan went to Egan Junior High School in Los Altos, and hopes to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology next year as a bioinformatics major. 

Pan said he was interested in math as a young child, but didn't develop a love of science until later. "My passion for science really kicked off sophomore year when I took an honors chemistry class at Gunn, and I brought the logic and math over to chemistry and the sciences," he said. 

—Bay City News service contributed to this report