Gitanjali Rao says she’s living proof that teens can innovate

Degrees and PhDs are valuable. But those aren’t necessary to be an innovator. Gitanjali Rao says she is living proof of the idea that you can start to take those first steps towards innovation even as a teenager in high school.

Time magazine featured the 15-year-old on its cover last year as their first `Kid of the Year’. In 2017, when she was 11, she won the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge, which came with a prize money of $25,000.

That win followed the Colorado girl’s work to create a device that could quickly detect lead in water. She had been deeply influenced by a public health crisis that started in 2014 after the drinking water for the city of Flint, Michigan, was contaminated with lead.

“I have a journal where I write down ideas and this is something that I had for a while and wanted to solve. I read through multiple articles and looked at newer approaches in scientific research and engineering. I developed something based on carbon nanotube sensor technology based on an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) article, where they used it to detect hazardous gases in the air,” Gitanjali told Times Techies on a call from Colorado.

That device, called Tethys, is now patented. “That (patenting) was very exciting. I’m in conversation with Intel, and others for validation and mass production,” she says.

Since then, she has developed an app called Kindly that uses AI to detect cyberbullying at an early stage. She’s working on a device to diagnose prescription opioid addiction using the latest developments in protein detection systems.

Gitanjali’s mother’s side is from Tamil Nadu, and father’s from Andhra Pradesh. Gitanjali says she’s been coming to India almost every year. “A lot of inspiration for my work, especially the latest one on detecting parasitic contaminants in drinking water, comes from countries like India,” she says.

Her work on Tethys helped her recognise that there are five steps in innovation – observe, brainstorm, research, build, communicate. She has been using these learnings to conduct workshops for aspiring young innovators. She says she has run 325 workshops, impacting 49,540 students across 150 countries, and worked with 6,000 educators.

Youngsters doing innovation, Gitanjali says, will absolutely need mentors. She needed them for all of her innovations. One of the biggest things that is overlooked in science and technology, she says, is the importance of asking for help and mentors. “I have learned so many incredible things from mentors. I just call people. Some say no, some say yes,” she says. One day she just picked up the phone and called Dr Michael McMurray in the University of Colorado’s school of medicine, and asked if he would mind her coming into his lab.

The day the Time cover story appeared, McMurray tweeted: “Gitanjali worked in my lab for the last couple of years. She is simply amazing.”

FacebookTwitterLinkedin