Brooklyn Girl Wins Third in Prestigious National Science Competition
Seventeen-year-old Stuyvesant High School senior Mimi Yen has walked away from the final round of the Intel Science Talent Search with third place honors and a $50,000 award, according to The New York Times SchoolBook blog.
The national research contest, which concluded Tuesday night in Washington, D.C., bills itself as “the oldest and most prestigious pre-college science competition.” Yen’s original research project rose through three rounds of review from a pool of roughly 1,600 submissions before securing her a spot on the winners’ podium.
Her project was a “study of evolution and genetics, which focuses on microscopic worms, specifically looking at their sex habits and hermaphrodite tendencies,” according to a news release from the competition obtained by SchoolBook. The underlying goal of Yen’s research was to provide insight into the way genes interact with human behavior.