Daniel Liu, a 10-year-old student at Ottawa Hills, has a large $10,000 check with his name on it that he says no ATM will accept.

Daniel, who is ahead of most of his peers in school, finished seventh grade this spring and won the 2015 National “You Be The Chemist Challenge” this month in Philadelphia and along with it earned $10,000 that will go toward his college education.

He was the youngest to ever win the competition and the first from Ohio.

The “You Be The Chemist Challenge” competition, created in 2004, is open to students in fifth through eighth grades and is designed to help middle school students learn chemistry concepts and their real-world applications.

Daniel and contestants from around the country battled through 11 rounds of chemistry questions. In the final round Daniel and one other contestant answered a series of 10 questions. They tied after that round and moved on to five more questions, before Daniel was finally crowned the winner.

Daniel said he liked that he never knew what type of chemistry question would be asked at any point in the competition.

“You don’t always know what is going to come next, you just have to be prepared,” he said. “Usually they would jump around to different subjects, so you had to be prepared for anything.”

Nearly 40,000 students participate in the local and state levels of the competition. Daniel advanced to the national contest by winning a competition at Ottawa Hills and then the contest for the state of Ohio.

Daniel will skip eighth grade and be a freshman at Ottawa Hills High School this fall. Last year he took courses that included honors chemistry and AP statistics. This fall he will take AP physics and AP calculus.

“We are bursting at the seams with pride,” Ottawa Hills Superintendent Kevin Miller said. “We are so happy to have Daniel in our school district. Daniel has an amazing mind and just this voracious appetite for learning, but what I really appreciate is that he is just a really neat kid.”

After a trip to Philadelphia and the experience of a lifetime, Daniel hopes he can apply what he learned from the competition to his high school classes and his future career.

“It was great because you get to experience a deeper view of chemistry,” Daniel said. “Then you can use that for your future careers. They say chemistry is like the building block for all careers.”

Contact Brian Buckey at: bbuckey@theblade.com or 419-376-9414.

First Published June 29, 2015, 4:00 a.m.