Way to Go! Yvette Leung of Jericho High School

Jericho High School senior Yvette Leung recently beat 37 students nationwide to win first place in the 2010 U.S. National Brain Bee, a neuroscience competition at the University of Maryland.

She earned a $1,500 scholarship and a summer internship with a neuroscientist. She will compete in the International Brain Bee this summer in San Diego.

To reach the national level, Leung won the Long Island Brain Bee at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University.

"I like neuroscience, because it's a relatively new field that merges many disciplines together - biology, chemistry, physics," said Leung, 17. "It's all stuff that relates to daily life."

To compete, she studied educational booklets supplied by the Society for Neuroscience and the International Brain Research Organization. The material is on the level of a second-year medical student, she said.

At the national level, Leung completed a neuroanatomy laboratory practical on an actual human brain as well as a microscope exam on neurohistological tissues, among other things.

The bees were sponsored by the Society for Neuroscience and the Dana Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes neuroscience education in schools.