Young women are the future of science. Don't believe me? Just check out Gitanjali Rao. The 11-year-old — yes, you read that correctly — from Lone Tree, Colorado, just scooped the $25,000 grand prize in the nationwide 2017 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge for students between grades 5 and 8. And her discovery couldn't be further from your average science fair volcano reaction project: Rao designed a simple, inexpensive test to check the lead contamination levels in water that works with an app, inspired by the Flint water crisis that began in 2015 when abnormally high lead levels were found in the industrial city's drinking water.
The Young Scientist Challenge has launched the careers of brilliant young women before. Deepika Kurup, who scooped the award in 2012 as a junior high student for her water-purification system, was on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2015, and is now at Harvard. But Rao's work is garnering headlines not just for her extreme youth, but for the brilliant applications of her invention.
When the drinking water in Flint, Mich., became contaminated with lead, causing a major public health crisis, 11-year-old Gitanjali Rao took notice.
"I had been following the Flint, Michigan, issue for about two years," the seventh-grader told ABC News. "I was appalled by the number of people affected by lead contamination in water."
She saw her parents testing the water in their own home in Lone Tree, Colo., and was unimpressed by the options, which can be slow, unreliable or both.
"I went, 'Well, this is not a reliable process and I've got to do something to change this,' " Rao told Business Insider.
Rao tells ABC that while she was doing her weekly perusal of MIT's Materials Science and Engineering website to see "if there's anything's new," she read about new technologies that could detect hazardous substances and decided to see whether they could be adapted to test for lead.
She pressed local high schools and universities to give her lab time and then hunkered down in the "science room" — outfitted with a big white table — that she persuaded her engineer parents to create in their home.
And she set about devising a more efficient solution: a device that could identify lead compounds in water and was portable and relatively inexpensive.
As she explains at lightning speed in her video submission for the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge, her device consists of three parts. There is a disposable cartridge containing chemically treated carbon nanotube arrays, an Arduino-based signal processor with a Bluetooth attachment, and a smartphone app that can display the results.
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