EXETER, NH (May 10, 2007)—Phillips Exeter junior, Yingyu ‘Dan’ Gao, a resident of Hockessin, DE, has been named a semifinalist in the USA Biology Olympiad National Finals, to be held this June at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Gao was one of 20 high school students nationwide to be selected for the prestigious training sessions, consisting of two weeks of intensive theoretical and practical tutorials with leading biologists.

In its first round of competition, the USABO was open to more than 5,000 interested high school students. The top 20 semifinalist participants are invited to the National Finals.

Gao was also accepted to participate in this year’s Research Science Institute, a rigorous academic and research program in mathematics, the sciences and engineering, but a scheduling conflict kept him from attending. RSI is sponsored by the Center for Educational Excellence and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is held each summer for six weeks on MIT’s campus, for high school students to take college-level classes taught by distinguished professors. The program is designed to sharpen their research skills and allows them to complete hands-on research with top mentors at corporations, universities, and research organizations.

Finally, Gao received an honorable mention for his score on the 2007 USA Mathematical Olympiad final exam. Gao’s score placed him among the top 20 Olympiad winners. The USAMO is a six-question, two-day, nine-hour examination held in April. All problems can be solved using pre-calculus methods. The 12 winners competed against a total of 505 U.S. Olympiad participants who were selected from 10,000 students who competed on the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME).

Phillips Exeter Academy is a coeducational, independent preparatory school that was founded in 1781 and originated the system of instruction known as Harkness teaching in 1931. In the spirit of its charter to foster both goodness and knowledge, students come from a wide variety of geographic, economic, racial and religious backgrounds. The diverse student body comes from approximately 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and 26 foreign countries.