Meet America's Top Young Scientist. She's 11 years old

Gitanjali Rao

AT AN AGE most 11-year old girls are more worried about fitting into middle-school, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan inspired Gitanjali Rao to invent a device to detect lead in drinking water.

For her invention, on Oct. 17, the Colorado student was named winner of the 2017 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge and named "America's Top Young Scientist."

Young Gitanjali is working to develop Tethys, a sensor-based device that can detect lead in water faster than other current techniques to bring it to market.

"So I've been following the Flint water crisis for about two years now," the seventh-grader said. "I thought about creating a device when I saw my parents testing for lead in our water using the test strips. I realized that it wasn't a reliable process. I wanted to do something to change this, not only for my parents, but for the residents of Flint and places like Flint around the world. ... 

"There are two main ways to test for lead in our water or just water quality in general," she explained. "One is the test strips, and the other one is sending our water off to the EPA. The test strips, on one hand, are easy to use and fast. But they're not accurate. And sending our water out to the EPA is accurate, but it's expensive. It requires expensive equipment and it's time-consuming."

Rather than using expensive equipment for testing, Gitanjali's cost-effective approach to water safety uses a mobile app that populates the water's status almost immediately. Tethys is designed to be portable and easy to use, allowing individuals to test water safety whenever needed. She hopes to solve the water contamination crisis and decrease long-term health effects from lead exposure.

"With most of the money, I plan to continue evolving my device so that it can be put out into market, and it can be in everyone's hands. With the rest of the money, I plan to give back to the organizations I volunteer for, such as Children's Kindness Network. I would also like to put the rest into my college fund."

No doubt, most colleges will give some financial incentives for this future scientist to attend their institution.

Meet Gitanjali Rao:

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