The Week Junior - Science + Nature
HEROES OF SCIENCE
Meet the young inventor who’s made it her mission to solve the world’s problems.
Meet one of the most inspiring young scientists.
Scientist and inventor Gitanjali Rao has a list of achievements that would make anyone proud. She has developed an app to help combat cyberbullying; invented a device to check if water is safe to drink; and has helped mentor 40,000 students. Remarkably, she achieved all this before her 16th birthday. This is why, last year, Time magazine named Rao, aged 15, its first ever Kid of the Year. Rao spoke to The Week Junior Science + Nature magazine about her life-changing inventions, mentoring other young scientists and her hopes of a world filled with kindness.
Kid of the Year
Time is a famous magazine that each year chooses a Person of the Year. Some of the previous people selected include climate activist Greta Thunberg and former US president Barack Obama. Although the magazine has chosen a Person of the Year for more than 90 years, it has never had a Kid of the Year before. In 2020, a committee selected five of the brightest young stars in the US from more than 5,000 people aged between eight and 16. Out of these five, Rao, from Colorado in the US, was chosen as the winner for her incredible inventions and for creating a global community of young innovators and inspiring them to pursue their goals. “It’s definitely been an honouring and beyond humbling experience,” Rao said. “It’s given me the opportunity to understand my potential, as well as help other students find their potential.”
Inspired to help
Rao became interested in science when she was around four or five years old. Her uncle gave her a chemistry set and she loved it. From then on she was hooked. “For the longest time, I was always super passionate about helping people,” she said. “And once I started to get involved in science, that’s when I started to use science to solve problems.“
First invention
When she was about 10 years old, Rao told her mother she wanted to research carbon nanotube sensor technology. “My mom was like, ‘A what?’” she told Time, but Rao had a plan. She had been inspired to help solve the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, in the US. In 2014, the city of Flint switched water supplies and did not clean the new water properly. It was contaminated with lead, a metal that is very harmful to people. “It was so hard to see how many kids my age are basically drinking poison every single day,” Rao said. So she created a small device – about the size of a pack of cards – named Tethys, which uses carbon nanotubes to detect lead in water.
Carbon nanotubes are tiny structures made from sheets of carbon atoms (the building blocks of all matter) just one atom thick, rolled into tubes and arranged in a honeycomb. The way they conduct electricity changes if there is lead in the water. Tethys senses this change, allowing it to measure how much metal there is in a sample and then send this information to a smartphone.
Deterring cyberbullying
Rao says science and technology can also play an important role in building a world filled with kindness. One way she is putting this into practice is with an app called Kindly. The app uses artificial intelligence (a computer system that is able to perform tasks that usually require human intelligence) to identify words and phrases that a person has typed that could be associated with bullying. The app then gives you the option to edit the words or send them anyway. Rao says the idea is to give people a chance to think about what they are sending.
Inspiring generations
When Rao isn’t busy inventing, she plays the piano, fences and is taking flying lessons. She has also set up a mentorship programme to inspire thousands of other young people to solve the world’s problems. This is important because “I don’t look like your typical scientist,” she told Time magazine. Rao says young people have the power to change the world. Her message for Science+nature readers is, “Find a big problem, find a small problem, and take those first steps and do a little something every day to solve it.”