19 year old Nigerian Harvard Neurologist Undergraduate; Saheela Ibraheem recognized as 1 of the world's 50 smartest teens in 2015

Saheela Ibraheem was named one of the World’s 50 Smartest Teenagers, and U.S. President Obama met and commended her on this feat at a reception celebrating Black History Month.

The teenager had the honour of introducing the President and First Lady Michelle Obama at the event.

Here’s a bit of what The Best Schools website had to say about the teenager,

At just 15 years old, Saheela Ibraheem was accepted into Harvard University, which makes her among the youngest students ever to attend that school. But that’s not the most impressive part, Saheela was accepted at 12 other colleges, including MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Brown, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Chicago.

Saheela’s Nigerian parents, totally supportive of the young scholar, sometimes taught her subjects the schools didn’t offer.

Saheela believes the key to success is knowing what you love to learn as early as possible, a knowledge she says she came to at age five. “If you are passionate about what you do, and I am passionate about many things, especially math and science, it will work out well.”The teen is also interested in languages, and knows Yoruba, Arabic, Spanish, and Latin, in addition to English.

As for her own brain, Saheela claims she is nothing special. “I try my best in everything I do,” Saheela said. “Anyone who’s motivated can work wonders.”

According to news.harvard.edu- http://bit.ly/1EnBdGA

Saheela Ibraheem was accepted to Harvard College at age 15, and arrived at 16. She took ultra-tough Math 55. She was a teaching fellow for Harvard’s largest class, CS50. She introduced President Barack Obama at a reception in March. Now, she is graduating at just 20.

So she’s planning a well-earned rest.

Ibraheem is a Quincy House neurobiology concentrator with a computer science secondary and an aim for a career in academia. That means graduate school is in her future. But first she’s taking a gap year and, for once, has no specific plans for it yet.

Ibraheem, who grew up in Piscataway, N.J., has long been in the spotlight for her academic achievements. At 16, she was named to a list of “The World’s 50 Smartest Teenagers,” which got the attention of the White House. She was invited to Washington, D.C., in early March, where she introduced the president and first lady at a reception to kick off Black History Month.

“She’s like the State Department and the National Institutes of Health all rolled into one,” Obama said during a short speech. “Young people like this inspire our future.”

Ibraheem became interested in neurobiology in high school — which she entered after skipping sixth and ninth grades — when she picked up a copy of “Gray’s Anatomy” at the school library. She fed that interest at Harvard not just in class, but also in the laboratory of Emery Brown, who investigates the neurobiology of anesthesia and holds appointments at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

Ibraheem’s parents are both numerically inclined. Her father is a quantitative analyst for a New York bank, and her mother is an accountant. She has three younger brothers, two of whom are in their first years at Yale University and Dartmouth College. Lest her academic accolades give her a big head, one brother reminds her occasionally that he got into Yale, and she didn’t.

Being younger than her Harvard classmates didn’t prove too difficult, Ibraheem said, though she recalled that one first meeting with a classmate devolved into an argument about how old she really was. Other than that, she said that being too young to buy some cold medicines or to see R-rated movies were the most significant obstacles.

At Harvard, Ibraheem has been a member of the Harvard Islamic Society, and worked with two other student groups: the Science Club for Girls, which provides after-school mentoring at the Amigos School in Cambridge, and,Dreamporte, which uses 3-D technology to teach geography and world culture to foster children.

When asked what advice she had for incoming students, Ibraheem said that they shouldn’t shy away from challenging classes, but that they also shouldn’t sacrifice sleep and free time just to study endlessly.

“There are so many new people. Meet as many as you can. Maybe try out extracurriculars you didn’t [try] before,” Ibraheem said.

Ibraheem said her Harvard experience transformed her from a shy person to someone comfortable meeting people, talking with them, and listening to them.

“[It was] definitely enlightening, transformative, unique,” she said.

“She’s like the State Department and the National Institutes of Health all rolled into one,” President Barack Obama has said of Saheela Ibraheem.