Olivia Hu

NEW YORK

Olivia Hu, 17, of Little Neck, submitted a behavioral and social sciences project to the Intel Science Talent Search that studied brain lateralization in Chinese-English bilingualism. Previous studies have shown that, when read, Chinese characters are processed in the right hemisphere of the brain whereas English involves the left. Olivia asked four graduate students, Chinese natives residing in the United States for less than three years, to perform two tasks that tested their reading abilities in both languages. Using magnetoencephalography she recorded neural activity and gathered data as their English proficiency improved. Olivia observed an inverse shift in lateralization over time, with English processed more on the right and Chinese more on the left as the subjects became more proficient in the second language, suggesting that bilingualism directly affects how people think. Olivia, a member of the policy debate team, takes a proactive stance on important social issues and helped raise thousands of dollars for national charities. The daughter of Anthony Fa Xiang Hu and Jessie Jian Wen Huang, she attends Stuyvesant High School in New York and plans to attend Stanford or Harvard.