11-year-old girl creates cheap device to test for poison in water

I have attended several seminars on achieving success and youth empowerment. And in ll the several seminars, there’s just one salient message, “Identify a problem, and find a solution to it.”

It’s highly unlikely 11-year-old, Gitanjali Rao attended the same seminars I did, but she has applied the principle and it has gotten her a cash price of $25000 and the title of “America’s top young scientist”.

Gitanjali Rao, who is a seventh grader from Colorado, was awarded the title of “America’s top young scientist” for designing a compact device to detect lead in drinking water, which she believes can be faster and cheaper than other current methods.

The 11-year-old’s invention was inspired by the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, where cost-cutting measures led to tainted drinking water that contained lead and other toxins. It also won her a $25,000 prize, for which Rao already has plans: “I plan to use most of it in developing my device further so that it can be commercially available soon,” she said

Rao who attends the STEM School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, originally submitted the idea to the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge, an annual youth science and engineering competition for middle school students in the US, inaugurated in 2008. She was awarded a 3-month mentorship with Kathleen Shafer, a research specialist who develops new plastics technologies: “Gitanjali’s concept was at a very early stage at the beginning of our mentorship. She had thought of this idea earlier this year, only a few weeks before the submission deadline,” Shafer said.