Jingru Chen

She is a research and development chemist by trade, an ardent St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan by choice/geography and a promising eater by temperament and desire. Jingru Chen won her hometown's Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest qualifier with 12 HDBs in 10 minutes. As a skilled scientist, she likely already knows that equates to 1.2 HDBs per minute, while the rest of us fumble in the intellectual dark with our calculators and our fangled adding machines.