Priyanka Das

The girl who topped this year's Orissa high school certificate examination said she wanted to be a scientist like President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.Priyanka Das, 15, a student of district government high school at Balasore, some 200 kilometers from the state capital Bhubaneswar, topped the Class 10 examination conducted by the Orissa Board of Secondary Examination (BSE) by securing 727 marks out of 750. The results were declared Tuesday.her father Saktaranjan is a tax consultant while Priyanka's mother Urvashi works as a zoology lecturer in a local college.This year about 400,000 students from 7133 state high schools had appeared for the Class 10 examination, which had been conducted simultaneously in 1713 centres across the state between March 7 and March 16.