by Melissa J. Brachfeld | Staff Writer
Flexing her mental muscles, 16-year-old Elena Kim Perry became the winner of the International Brain Bee in Montreal last week.
‘‘I was pretty thrilled to win,” the Richard Montgomery High School sophomore said. ‘‘It felt like the culmination of all my hard work.”
The International Brain Bee, which took place May 26, is a live question-and-answer competition that tests the neuroscience knowledge of high school students. It is directed by its founder, Norbert Myslinski of the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the University of Maryland Dental School.
The competition is three-tiered. In February, 20 students from 12 high schools in Maryland and Washington, D.C., participated in the National Capital Area Brain Bee. As winner of that contest, Perry went on to win the three-day American Brain Bee in Baltimore in March.
Perry beat out three other students from India, Canada and Australia during the International Brain Bee. She received a $3,000 prize, a personal trophy and a traveling trophy, which will be displayed at Richard Montgomery.
‘‘It was really interesting because we were from four corners of the world almost,” she said. ‘‘It was nice to make some new friends.”
The Bethesda resident said she enjoyed her first trip to Canada, but is ‘‘relieved” to be done with her grueling studying regimen.
She created more than 1,000 flashcards, one for each question she thought might be asked, and memorized them. For the national and international competitions, she also took notes from online sources about diseases and disorders, studied textbooks and used plastic models of the brain to learn neuroanatomy, and met with a practicing neurologist.
‘‘It was a little hard to balance everything in the weeks leading up to the competitions, but it all worked out in the end,” she added.
This summer, Perry, who maintains a full schedule during the school year as a violinist with the Maryland Classic Youth Orchestra and a member of Richard Montgomery’s pre-International Baccalaureate program, said she is looking forward to a little relaxation and completing a paid internship at the National Institute of Mental Health.
She is considering a career in neuroscience as a biomedical researcher, but noted she is also is interested in environmentally conscious technology and design.
Gina Kim Perry, Perry’s mother, said she is proud of her daughter, who she describes as a ‘‘hard worker.”
‘‘We think it’s given more confidence to Elena and we’re very happy for her,” she said.
