Creativity and passion to make a difference are exemplified by the students named winners of 2016 Da Vinci Science Center Hall of Fame Awards.

Two Parkland students were honored, along with the Da Vinci Science Center’s 2016 corporate and community award winners, during the center’s annual gala this spring at the Renaissance Allentown Hotel.

The Da Vinci Science Center has bestowed its Hall of Fame Awards annually since 1999 to educators, high school students, professionals, companies, and community leaders who bring science to life and bring lives to science throughout eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey.

Creative accomplishments of this year’s student and educator honorees include the invention of a hair brush that could keep floors clean from fallen hair, a state championship-winning robotics and coding team, a giant wooden underwater cello, and a new high-tech method for fighting terrorism.

“The insatiable curiosity, ingenuity, and desire to create new things that benefit others embodied by our student and educator award winners demonstrates the exciting possibilities that the STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – offer each and every day,” said Lin Erickson, Da Vinci Science center executive director and CEO. “These students and teachers provide vibrant and inspiring proof that our greater Lehigh Valley community is filled with the same pioneering and unstoppable spirit that humanity has harnessed to cure disease, span the oceans, and explore distant planets.”

Vidhyasai Annem, an eighth grade student at Springhouse Middle School, received the 2016 Young Scientist Award.

A graduate of the Center’s Inventor’s Lab Program, she was the winner of the program’s Most Patentable Idea Award in 2014.

She has earned a provisional U.S. patent for her invention of a multiple-section hair brush that keeps stray hair from falling to the floor through use of a special fluid.

Yogeshwar Velingker, a junior at Parkland High School, received the Center’s 2016 Student Excellence Awards.

Velingker is a founder of the Lehigh Math Circle, a club that encourages middle school students to enjoy exploring advanced mathematics on a peer-to-peer basis.

He also has created his school’s Physics Club and is working to develop a computer-based tool that detects and analyzes unconscious patterns of human behavior and applies its findings to combat terrorism and other sophisticated crimes.