David Huang, a junior at The Charter School of Wilmington was one of four -- from a pool of nearly 10,000 students -- to represent the
Huang of Hockessin, along with Jonathan Gootenberg of Montgomery Blair High school in Rockville, Md., Seungsoo Kim of Mountain View High School in Vancouver, Wash. and Jonathan Liang of Thomas S. Wootton High School in North Potomac, Md. comprised Team USA.
Each took home a gold medal, helping to establish that the United States has some of the brightest biology students in the world. There were 220 competitors from 60 countries in all.
U.S. Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) honored Huang for his achievement August 20 in his Wilmington office.
The IBO is an annual competition for secondary school students testing their skills in tackling biological problems and dealing with biological experiments. The IBO tries to challenge and stimulate these students to expand their talents and to promote their career as a scientist.
One sample question on the test Olympiad competitors was “The increase in complexity of the vertebrate circulatory system is represented by one of the following combinations. A toad-rabbit-alligator-shark, B shark-frog-alligator-rabbit, C shark-crocodile-rabbit-frog, D alligator-dog-shark-toad.” (See answer below.)
Huang thanked Charter School and his biology teacher, Beenu Gupta, for preparing him for the competition.
“I might not have gone were it not for Mrs. Gupta,” he said.
What impresses Gupta about Huang is not just the fact that he works hard, but his conviction in defending and arguing for an answer he believes he is right.
“That tells me right there he has so much potential,” she said. “He looks very quiet but when it comes to studying material, he fights for it.”
Castle said he is pleased Huang won a gold medal during a time when people are being honored with gold medals every night during the Olympics in Beijing.
When Castle took a look at some sample questions for the Olympiad, he was impressed.
“I had no idea what those questions were all about. I took biology in college and …decided to go to law school," he quipped.
Charter School President Ron Russo called Huang’s gold medal a “huge accomplishment.”
“The greatest resource that any country has is its people,” Russo said. “We’ve been able to make strategic changes in how we do education in order to develop the major resource that we have. We can not only meet the competition in the world. We can beat the competition.”
Castle said he believes science education and education in general are the answers to the United States’ economic problems.
“We need to stay competitive globally and we need good math backgrounds and good science backgrounds,” he said. “We need students such as David to make a difference.”
Answer: shark-frog-alligator-rabbit
