US:YOUTHFUL PRODIGY, clarinet maestro, black-belt martial artist and budding scientist, Alia Sabur has astonished her parents and teachers for years with her exploits inside and outside the classroom.
Now, still a year shy of being able to buy her first legal drink, the New Yorker has been named the world's youngest college professor ever, breaking a record set nearly three centuries ago by a Scottish mathematician.
Korea's Konkuk University has announced that Alia will begin teaching physics this month at the department of advanced technology fusion. The appointment, a few days short of her 19th birthday, earns the doctoral student a place in The Guinness Book of World Records ahead of Colin Maclaurin, a physicist who became professor of maths at the University of Aberdeen in 1717.
Few who know her were surprised at the announcement. University graduate at 10, bachelor's degree at 14, masters at 17; Alia has been "setting records and making history starting with reading at eight months old," says her website (http://www.aliasabur.com). Along the way, she found time to become a concert clarinetist, debuting with the Rockland Symphony Orchestra, aged 11. She plays Mozart, but loves U2. "I went to their Vertigo concert," she says on the phone from New York. "It was awesome."
A PhD candidate in materials science and engineering, Alia is working on developing spectroscopy techniques "including nano-tube-based cellular probes" that could be used to zap tumours - a cure for cancer, in other words. At college in the US, she helped work with her professor on a cure for Alzheimer's disease. Last year, while waiting to decide her future, she took a temporary position in New Orleans's Southern University; a historically black institution that she felt had been neglected by the authorities after Hurricane Katrina.
"It is the only university that is operating out of trailers, even this long. People don't realise that it is the only black public college in New Orleans. It is not something you're supposed to say but I do think that is why it is not as far along as other colleges."
What's her secret? Childlike curiosity, she says. "I always just wanted to know how things worked. What is science really? It's how stuff works." She thanks God, and her mum and dad - a retired engineer and a cable TV reporter - for her genius. "My parents encouraged me in anything I wanted to do. We believe it is a gift from God and they made the most of it, a combination of gift and environment."
The gift has sometimes been a burden. By five, Alia had outgrown her primary school friends and had to bounce ahead into secondary, where she became, in effect, a misfit, too far ahead of everyone else for scheduled lessons. Colleges refused to consider her, so she read in class by herself, and studied Tae-Kwon-Do, becoming a black belt at nine. At 10, she was finally accepted by Stony Brook University in New York, where she took her stuffed toys along to physics classes.
The Guinness announcement has sparked a deluge of e-mails from curious parents across the planet. "They want advice for their kids. I say encourage them at what they're good at. Assume that everyone else is trying to discourage them and try to compensate." But not everyone is polite. "One person said: 'What are you, an alien or something?'"