History

The history of AlphaStar Academy roots back to early 2000’s when the team members, Ali Gurel and Fatih Gelgi, came together around the idea of motivating and training gifted students through regional, national and international competitions and Olympiads. With the addition of Mehmet Kaysi and Murat Biyik to the team, the program and curriculum was built over the years and evolved into the A-Star Program known today.

In the beginning, two former Olympians Ali and Fatih were coaching gifted students in South California and Arizona, in Math and Computer Science when they were graduate students at Caltech and Arizona State University, respectively. After years of training, one of their students Zarathustra Brady (a.k.a. Zeb) was invited to the top Math and Computer Science in USA, Math Olympiad Summer Program (2006) and USA Computing Olympiad National Camp (2005-2007). Zeb was also selected to the USA Math Team of six students and won a Gold Medal in the International Math Olympiads 2006.

After receiving their PhD’s, Dr. Ali and Dr. Gelgi joined an education company in South California. They started an Advanced Math and Science Program serving gifted students in California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado via regional, state, and national Math and Computer Science camps. At the same time, Dr. Ali was one of the coaches of the USA Math Olympiad team whereas Dr. Gelgi was serving as a coach of the USA Computing Olympiad.

First A-Star courses were introduced in 2008 in South California. The following year, another former math Olympian Mehmet Kaysi joined the team. In 2010, Murat Biyik who served long years in education as a teacher and administrator, joined the team as well.

In the fall of 2010, A-Star courses were introduced to Bay Area community and soon became a well-established program in Bay Area. Year after year, A-Star students had tremendous success in Math and Computer Science competitions with several National finalists in MathCounts, dozens of perfect scorers in American Mathematics Competitions, dozens of winners and finalists in USA Math and Computing Olympiads, and several Gold medalists in International Math Olympiads and International Olympiad in Informatics. A-Star teams also got top rankings in math competitions organized by Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Caltech, and Harvey Mudd.

In 2017, the team members founded AlphaStar Academy to further improve the gifted community and students. As A-Star team, we believe that discovering and training gifted students towards their potential is critical for our country’s future. In that perspective, we try to fulfill our share by providing advanced math and science programs for those students, free master classes and trainings, and supporting the local gifted community via sponsoring math and science events.

We would like to thank many exceptional people who contributed to the development of A-Star program over the years.