🇺🇸 Kian Dhawan

The American selection funnel is the part of this that is hardest to appreciate from the outside. The USA Biolympiad, run by the Center for Excellence in Education, registered 12,808 students in 2026 from 47 United States schools across 46 states and 35 international schools. That field is cut to twenty finalists, who are brought to Harvard University for a ten-day national finals programme running from 21 June to 2 July, studying with practising biologists in cellular and molecular biology, plant anatomy and physiology, animal anatomy and physiology, genetics and other advanced life-science subjects. Four of the twenty go to the international olympiad.

Dhawan won gold at the USA Biolympiad national finals in both 2026 and 2025, and took an IBO gold medal in both years as well. Repetition is a more informative signal than a single result at this level. A one-off gold can be produced by a favourable paper; two in consecutive years, through a selection process that resets from scratch each cycle, is much harder to attribute to a good day.

The 2026 olympiad in Vilnius brought together students from 78 countries across five continents. All four members of the United States team — Dhawan, Suzuko Ohshima of North Hollywood Senior High School in California, Emma Li of the Lakeside School in Seattle and Kevin Wu of BASIS Independent Bellevue in Washington — were awarded gold medals, which the Center for Excellence in Education described as a grand slam. "These students honored our country at the IBO competition," said Joann DiGennaro, the organisation's president. "They are exceptional scholars headed for outstanding careers."

One thing should be stated plainly, because the word gold invites the wrong inference. The International Biology Olympiad awards gold medals to a band of top-scoring contestants rather than to a single winner; a gold medal is a placing in the leading group of an international field, not a claim to have finished first in the world. Four golds from one four-person team is a genuinely unusual sweep, and it is still four placings in a top band rather than four world titles.

The practical examinations are what distinguish this olympiad from a written science competition. Contestants rotate through laboratory stations under time pressure — pipetting, dissection, microscopy, identification keys, data analysis — with equipment and protocols they have often not used before. Theory can be revised; practical technique under a clock, on unfamiliar apparatus, in a foreign laboratory, generally cannot. It is the closest thing the olympiad circuit has to a working-scientist test.

Dhawan's stated interests run wider than biology — biology, chemistry and physics — and he planned to study mathematics and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from the autumn of 2026. That is a common trajectory among olympiad medallists and slightly at odds with the popular picture of early specialisation: the students who reach the top of a subject olympiad are frequently the ones who did not narrow early, and who go on to study something adjacent to the discipline they won in.