Philippine-born VICTORIA BRAGIN was first-prize co-winner in the third Van Cliburn International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs, a competition for pianists 35 years or older who do not earn their principal living from piano performance or piano teaching. In this first competition that she'd ever entered at the time, Bragin also won the Audience Award and the awards for Best Performance of a Work from the Romantic Era and Best Performance of a Modern Work. More recently she won first prize in the Chicago Piano Amateur Competition held in June 2010.

Except for a brief one-year appointment as piano and music theory instructor for music education students at the University of South Carolina before she and her husband moved to California, all of Ms. Bragin's professional life has been in science education. She taught pre-college math, chemistry, and physics ....