By Michelle Jaffee; photos by Jackie Hart
Simon Ropicki was determined to come back to the Alachua County Brain Bee.
In the competition two years ago, as a 12-year-old competing against mostly high school students, he finished in third place. Last year, he came in second.
So as the spelling-bee-style contest of neuroscience facts rolled around this year, Simon, who’s interested in pursuing a medical field as a future career, started setting aside around 20 minutes each day to practice. Among other techniques, he used study materials offered by UF students who were organizing the event.
On Saturday, after a knockout round in the McKnight Brain Institute’s DeWeese Auditorium, Simon came out on top of a field of 10 competitors from eight schools across Florida, winning a $2,450 travel grant and registration fee to compete in the 2026 USA Brain Bee Championship in April at the University of California, Irvine.
“I started studying roughly around Thanksgiving break, and I read two books they provided twice and after that did a bunch of quiz questions, ones they provided and some I found online from other universities that hold the same style of competition,” said Simon, now a 14-year-old ninth-grader at Gainesville’s Eastside High School.
Varshitha Bojanapati of Florida Atlantic University High School came in second, and Michael Liu of P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School finished third.
Sponsored by the MBI and UF’s BRAIN Center and BREATHE Center, the Brain Bee tests knowledge about anatomy, neuroimaging, disease processes and more.
As part of the daylong event, all participants received new bike helmets to promote brain health and safety, and they also had a chance to pose questions about college life and admissions during a panel discussion led by five UF undergrads.
Ariana Burga, a UF doctoral student in psychology who served as Brain Bee Chair with the North Central Florida Society for Neuroscience, and Shreya Sreekanth, an undergraduate health sciences major who served as vice chair, led a team of student volunteers who organized the event and prepared over 100 test questions.
In the knockout round, participants wrote responses on dry-erase boards, holding them up game-show style for judges, with questions such as: “Which brain hemisphere is speech lateralized in?”
In some cases, students had to apply their knowledge of neuroscience to a clinical scenario to arrive at the correct answer.
The hope, said Burga, is for all participants to come away with new knowledge. “We want this to stick with them throughout many years to come,” Burga said.
With the world’s complex problems, Sreekanth said in closing remarks, “the world needs curious minds like yours to help solve them.”