Leyte girl wins int’l Science contest

Leyte girl wins int’l Science contest

A student from Leyte bested 11,000 young learners from 178 countries to bag the third annual Breakthrough Junior Challenge (BJC) Prize, earning over PHP20 million worth of prizes.
She is the first Filipina to win the Challenge.

Hillary Diane Andales, 18, from the Philippine Science High School (PSHS) Eastern Visayas Campus in Palo, Leyte personally received the award on December 3 at the NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.
The native of Abuyog, Leyte made the video Relativity and Equivalence of Reference Frames, understandable to the layman.

As the winner, Andales received a USD250,000 post-secondary scholarship as well as a USD50,000 prize for her science teacher Xavier Francis de los Reyes and a USD100,000 Breakthrough Science Lab for her school designed in partnership with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

The Breakthrough Junior Challenge is an annual global competition for students to inspire creative thinking about science. Students ages 13 to 18 from countries across the globe are invited to create and submit original videos (3 minutes in length maximum) that bring to life a concept or theory in the life sciences, physics or mathematics. The submissions are judged on the student’s ability to communicate complex scientific ideas in engaging, illuminating, and imaginative ways. The Challenge is organized by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.

The Breakthrough Prize was created to honor important advancements in the categories of Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences and Mathematics. The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. The Breakthrough Prize aims to celebrate the best scientific work and inspire the next generation of scientists.
Hillary’s winning video – http://bit.ly/2jOsjS1

(PRESS RELEASE)