A senior high student from Taipei City won the top award in the world's largest pre-college science contest on Friday, the first time a Taiwanese student has won the award.
Su Yi-han (蘇意涵), of the Taipei Municipal First Girls’ Senior High School (北一女), won the prestigious ISEF Young Scientist Award, the Best of Category as well as First Award in the Chemistry category with her study “Efficient Hydrogen Production Using Cu-Zn-Al Prepared by Homogenous Precipitation Method.”
Su, who spent 11 months completing her research, responded to news of the award with disbelief and said she was moved at witnessing the enthusiasm demonstrated by high school students from all over the world during the fair.
Tsui Te-hsin (崔德昕), of National Hsinchu Girls’ Senior High School (新竹女子中學), won Second Award in the Physics and Astronomy category, Third Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers and American Physical Society, and the United Technologies Corporation Special Award, with her study “Dancing Water Droplets.”
Wang Yun-chu (王韻筑), also from the Taipei Municipal First Girls’ Senior High School, won Third Award in the Physics and Astronomy category with her “Correlation between Thermal Behavior and Molecular Network in Rubber.”
Juang Di-chiao (莊迪喬), of Kao-hsiung Municipal Senior Girls’ High School (高雄女中), won Fourth Award in the Plant Sciences category and First Award from the American Society for Horticultural Science with her study “Molecular and Cellular Response under Hypoxic Stress in Rice Cultivars with Different Flooding Tolerance.”
Feng Kuei-chaung (馮桂莊), acting director of the experimentation section of the National Taiwan Science Education Center (國立台灣科學教育館), who led the group, said that Taiwan had participated in the ISEF 12 times since 1993, while this year’s results have been outstanding, with half the entries scooping awards.
Furthermore, only three ISEF Young Scientist Awards are given each year and have normally been won by students from the US in the past. This made Su’s success at this year’s fair all the more impressive, Feng said.
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