A Science Prodigy in an Unlikely Place

[hyphenate]

A Science Prodigy in an Unlikely Place
Phil Marino for The New York Times

By JOSEPH BERGER
Published: March 9, 2008
BAYONNE, N.J.

ERIC DELGADO is what those in research call an outlier — an anomaly, a deviation from the typical.

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But that’s not the path Mr. Delgado followed while investigating the mechanism that bacteria use to resist antibiotics. He did not attend Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan or any of the Long Island public schools that pop out Intel winners like clockwork. Rather he is a senior at Bayonne High School, a three-block-long fortress in a blue-collar city of 62,000 where oil refinery tanks loom over a landscape of one- and two-family clapboard houses. The median household income is $41,566. Only half the 3,000 high school students go on to four-year colleges.

“We have a history of kids who go to Ivy League schools and kids who try to stay out of prison,” was how Robert Dawson, the Bayonne School District’s director of science, tartly described the spectrum of students.

AT Bayonne, Maria Aloia, a physical science teacher who runs the science seminar, helped Mr. Delgado secure bacteria cultures and plant extracts and arranged telephone and e-mail consultations with scientists in California, Colorado and Arkansas. But he never met those mentors face to face. He did the research on his own, working out of a storage closet at the back of a science classroom where his equipment was not much more sophisticated than a centrifuge and an incubator.

Yet Mr. Delgado, a broad-shouldered youth whose twin, Nelson, is the captain of the football team, became the first finalist Bayonne ever had in the 67-year-old Intel contest (originally known as the Westinghouse). He showed that Intel scholars can blossom in any soil if a student is ardent about investigative science.

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rest of article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/09Rintel.html?em&ex=1205211600&en=c888f5946cd35657&ei=5087%0A

[flashl]

1. Thanks for sharing. nt

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. and if there are teachers willing to go the extra mile

and help out by connecting him to mentors, etc.

[bananas]

3. k&r nt