🇺🇸 Kevin Wu

His own description of how he got here is unusually concrete. According to the biography published with the results, Wu "found a great interest in biological systems years ago, [and] has since perused textbooks ranging in topic from biochemistry to mycology. In the meantime, he satisfies his need to look at greenery by adding to his over 5,000 observations on iNaturalist and capture pictures of his favorite moss, P. insigne. On his less active days, he returns to reading and editing Wikipedia, skimming the latest issue of Cell."

That combination — bench-level reading in biochemistry and mycology alongside thousands of field identifications — maps onto the olympiad's structure better than a purely academic preparation would. The International Biology Olympiad tests animal morphology and systematics and plant biology as practical stations, and identification under time pressure is a skill built by doing it repeatedly on real organisms, not by revising a key. Five thousand observations is a lot of repetitions.

The route to the team is severe. The USA Biolympiad, administered by the Center for Excellence in Education, registered 12,808 students in 2026 across 46 states and 35 international schools. Twenty were selected as national finalists and brought to Harvard University for a ten-day programme from 21 June to 2 July, working with practising biologists across cellular and molecular biology, plant anatomy and physiology, animal anatomy and physiology and genetics. Four of those twenty flew to Vilnius.

All four came back with gold: Wu, Emma Li of the Lakeside School in Seattle, Kian Dhawan of Montgomery Blair High School in Maryland and Suzuko Ohshima of North Hollywood Senior High School in California. The organisers described the result as a grand slam. "These students honored our country at the IBO competition," said Joann DiGennaro, president of the Center for Excellence in Education. "They are exceptional scholars headed for outstanding careers."

The medal needs the same caveat as every olympiad gold. The IBO awards gold to a band of high-scoring contestants rather than to a single winner; the medal certifies a placing in the leading group of an international field drawn from 78 countries, not a first place in the world. The 2026 competition included practical examinations in molecular biology and biochemistry, animal physiology, animal morphology and systematics, and plant and computational biology, and theoretical papers spanning cell biology, ethology, genetics, evolution, ecology and biosystematics.

Being a sophomore matters arithmetically as well as narratively. The olympiad is open to secondary-school students, so a tenth-grade medallist has years of eligibility left, and returning to the national finals with a gold medal already banked changes what the selection process is measuring. It is also a reminder that the skills the IBO rewards are not evenly distributed by age: a student who has spent several years identifying organisms in the field arrives with something that cannot be revised for in a single season.