Pinay student wins P20M in global science competition

A Filipina student from Leyte has bagged over P20-million worth of cash prizes after beating 11,000 other students from all over the world in the Breakthrough Junior Challenge (BJC), an annual international science competition.

The 18-year-old Hillary Andales of the Philippine Science High School-Eastern Visayas Campus bested all competitors for explaining the complicated Relativity and Equivalence of Reference Frames in just a three-minute video.

Andales, the first Filipina to win the competition, received the award at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ames Research Center in California on December 3.

The Filipina student from Palo, Leyte bagged $250,000 worth of college scholarship, $100,000 Breakthrough Prize Lab for her school, and $50,000 for her science teacher.

The BJC is an annual global competition for students to inspire creative thinking about science. The competition is now on its third year.

The competition was founded by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, together with Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Yuri and Julia Milner. /jpv