The Liberal Arts and Science Academy (LASA) of Austin’s Science Olympiad team got 2015 off to a great start by winning an invitational competition at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on January 24.

The LASA team followed that triumph with another one, this time at the Wright State University Science Olympiad on February 7.

Science Olympiad is an annual national competition built upon science-themed challenges for middle school and high school students. The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics is a Silver Sponsor for the 2015 competition.

Amanda Baker, program manager at Frontiers and project manager for Frontiers for Young Minds, published a blog article earlier this week on the Scientific American website, not only explaining the format of the competition but also providing insight from Science Olympiad alumni.

One of those interviewed by Baker is Dr. Dusty Schroeder, a Radar Geophysicist and Systems Engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology, a National Event Supervisor for middle school astronomy events in Science Olympiad and co-chair of the National Earth and Space Science Committee for Science Olympiad. Dr. Schroeder earned his PhD at UTIG in May 2014, and is a former coach for the LASA Science Olympiad team.

He delivered the keynote speech at the MIT invitational competition.

You can read Dr. Baker’s blog article here. A link to UTIG’s Science Olympiad page provides more information about the competition.