14-year-old prodigy pursues two degrees at Michigan school
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — Daniel Liu is used to being ahead of the curve.
He learned the alphabet by age 1 and began reading by the time he was 2. At age 10, he became the youngest person to ever win the national You Be The Chemist challenge, allowing him to meet President Barack Obama.
He even found time as a budding academic to become a viral internet meme.
“I was pretty curious, even at a young age, according to my parents,” Liu said, with a wide smile.
At 14, Liu now is pursuing two University of Michigan bachelor’s degrees -- one in chemistry, as the youngest member of its prestigious Sanford Group, and another in computer science. He’s taking 12 credits in his first semester of college and is working on developing chemical reactions that could help pharmaceutical companies make more environmentally friendly products.
As the youngest student in all his courses, Liu said he’s used to the spectacle he creates by simply learning and conducting research, MLive reported.
“I’ve made a lot of friends,” Liu said. “Maybe at the beginning of the semester, everyone went super crazy (about me being here), but after that, everything settled down to normal. I’m just another classmate in a 200-person lecture.”
Liu has been preparing for his future academic pursuits most of his life. He accumulated around 100 credits through dual enrollment at Ottawa Hills High School in Ohio, taking classes at the University of Toledo full time by the time he was a high school junior.
He and a post-doctoral student at Toledo worked together to co-author his first academic research paper in the Journal of American Chemical Society in 2018 that focused on creating pharmaceuticals in a less expensive, more environmentally friendly way.
If it all sounds too complicated for a...