17-Year-Old From Tijuana Wins Second Place at a Biotech Contest in Poland

He studied at the University of San Diego and now he has a big chance in Germany

By Nairda Ariday Ortega2016-07-13T18:51:40+00:00

Tijuana.- Jaime Castillo is the name of a young man that started his interest for science in Elementary School, by participating in all sorts of different contests that helped the community with the results of his work.

With this attitude he earned the full support of his parents and of Moises Camarena Lew, Director of Colegio La Paz, who helped Jaime participate in a variety of research projects in the University of San Diego, where he worked with silver nanoparticles to fight cancer.

As if that wasn't exciting enough, he got the attention of the Tijuana Rotary Club, which decided to offer him an opportunity of studying in Poland. After giving it a little thought (he would lose a year of High School) he accepted.

Once he was there he went looking for labs in Varsovia, where he was going to live, work, and stay. Sooner than later he found the Molecular Machine Lab, where the access is limited to only skillful people getting ready for their PhD.

He started doing simple chores like washing lab material, but it didn't take long until the rest of the lab workers gave him more responsibilities and ultimately allowed him to work on his own project.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Ministry of Health Of The European Union announced that by 2050, the known antibiotics won't kill bacteria, causing the death of more than 10 million people around the world. Inspired by this, Jaime worked on his own research, which consisted in finding an antibiotic that prevented bacteria of becoming resistant to it.

This investigation led him to participate in the Biotech Interuniversity Contest. He was the only Latino contestant among more than 100 PhD students from Cambridge, Berlin, Germany and Barcelona. Thanks to all his efforts he won 2nd place and he couldn't hide his excitement:

"When you win something like this you can only think of all the people that helped you... yes, I was the only one making 96 tests every two hours but at the end, I'm here thanks to the support of so many people, the society, Tijuana."

There is no doubt that talent is everywhere, it's time for the community to start encouraging this brilliant minds and create a better country, but most importantly, a better world. For now, the City of Tijuana feels so proud of this young soul and waits to hear more from him in the future.