Three Winnipeggers vying for Smartest Person crown

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This article was published 19/9/2014 (2023 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canada's smartest person is between the ages of 16 and 71, resides somewhere between Victoria, B.C. and Cole Harbour, N.S., and could be a fighter pilot, a cheese salesman, a physicist, a poet, a former Olympian, an orthopedic surgeon or a poker-playing firefighter.

Oh, and there's a decent chance that he or she might be from Winnipeg.

CBC released the roster of finalists for the upcoming Sunday series Canada's Smartest Person, and the field of 32 non-knuckleheaded Canucks vying for the title includes three from Winnipeg: Alea Ciecko, a 23-year-old psychiatric nursing student; Cat Jahnke, 33, a musician; and Melanie Martin, a 40-year-old physicist and associate professor of physics and radiology.

The youngest contestant in the Smartest Person field is Nader Nadernejad, a 16-year-old student from Peterborough, Ont., and the oldest is George Millar, a 71-year-old teacher from Edmonton.

In each episode of Canada's Smartest Person, which premières Sept. 28 on CBC, four contestants will face off in a series of challenges that test six areas of intelligence: linguistic, physical, musical, visual, social and logical. One winner from each week's show will advance to the championship finale, in which the Top 8 will compete for the title of Canada's Smartest Person.

The series, co-hosted by Jessi Cruickshank and Jeff Douglas, is based on the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Viewers will be invited to play along, either by downloading the Canada's Smartest Person app or by following online at cbc.ca/smartestperson.