Huntington High School senior Juli Coraor has made it to the final group of the Intel Science Talent Search contest. 

After receiving a call from Intel representatives Wednesday evening, Coraor said she was in disbelief.

"I didn't believe that I was going to be a finalist at all, so it was a pretty big surprise for me," she said, on hearing the news.

One of 40 remaining finalists, Coraor will head to Washington, D.C., March 8-13 to compete for more than $630,000 in awards provided by the Intel Foundation. The top winner receives a scholarship valued at $100,000.

To prepare, Coraor said she plans on going over her paper to make sure she is able to explain it well and she plans on practicing with her teacher on presenting. She also must construct a poster.

"Other than that, I'll have to work it out as I go," said Coraor, who turned 17 the day after being named a semi-finalist earlier this month.

Coraor said she's looking forward to meeting the other finalists.

"I really want to see what they actually did and what motivated them to do it and see what they found," she said.

Last year, Evan O'Dorney, of Danville, Calif., won first place for a mathematical project in which he compared two ways to estimate the square root of an integer.

Curaor's project, "The Impact of Compressive Misfit Strain on Improper Ferroelectricity in Lead Titanate/Strontium Titanate Superlattices," was chosen out of 1,839 entrants from 497 high schools in 44 states, the District of Columbia, and three overseas schools. She was a Simons Summer Research fellow and made the daily trip to the college campus over the summer to work on her project. 

“I wanted to see if strain – warping the materials – would have an effect on this improper ferroelectricity that we found in these specific materials,” Coraor explained earlier this month.

Coraor is considering the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Cornell, Princeton and Stony Brook. Her mother, Hanna Nekvasil, is a geochemistry professor at Stony Brook.