“I realized how big the problem was and how closely connected I was to it,” said the Bayview Secondary School student in Ontario, Canada.

In response, Shanzeh is developing BeBella, a postpartum app designed to help new moms to navigate their postpartum journeys. 

New mothers can track their postpartum health, such as water intake and sleep patterns, and can use artificial intelligence to create a personalized care plan.

Moms can also journal how they’re feeling.

Shanzeh said the data, with its AI component, can streamline and coordinate their health care journeys with their doctors. She added that postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis affects hundreds of millions of mothers worldwide.

“And because of that” she said, “I know that the app does have a lot of potential to impact and transform these people’s lives.”

Her project, Rubix, inspired by the Rubik’s Cube and Lego, is a tiny prefabricated home complete with a kitchen, a bathroom and other necessities.

 “It’s intended for independent living with dignity for the homeless population,” Wang said.

Rubix is entirely off-grid, powered by solar energy, and uses bamboo and recycled plastics as its main construction materials.

Unlike any of the other tiny home products that are available on the market, Wang said, “it’s an innovative design that makes manufacturing, transportation and installation cheaper, faster and far more efficient.”

Rubix has an independent plumbing system, so it can also be used in natural disaster relief. 

Wang has been communicating with city council members and nonprofits that are interested in seeing Rubix being implemented in San Diego.

She is also fundraising to create a full-scale prototype. Wang says she’s aiming for a one-time purchase cost of $30,000, compared to the $50,000 per year San Diego shelter beds cost to maintain.

For her work on Rubix, Wang , a nonprofit that provides opportunities for accomplished young people to make a positive difference.

In honor of 3.14, we recently canvassed the country, searching out STEM students with noteworthy projects and inventions. You can see all our recent profiles on our STEM Superstars microsite; here are our most recent video profiles of four remarkable teenagers: 

Helping Amputees — Virginia’s Arav Bhargava

The 18-year-old senior at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia has developed a universal fit, 3D-printed prosthetic for amputees missing their forearms. (Read the full story) 

Confronting Depression & Suicide — New York’s Natasha Kulviwat

The 17-year-old from Jericho researched a biomarker to help identify those at risk of suicide. (Read the full story) 

Easing Anxiety — Philadelphia’s Gavriela Beatrice Kalish-Schur

The 18-year-old senior at Pennsylvania’s Julia R. Masterman High School gave fruit flies anxiety to gain a deeper understanding for what makes us anxious — and to pave the path for better treatments. (Read the full story) 

Improving Rural Health Care — Maryland’s William Gao

The 18-year-old from Ellicott City’s Centennial High School created an AI-enabled diagnostic app that could help save rural cancer patients. (Read the full story) 

And in honor of March 14 and Women’s History Month, The 74’s Trinity Alicia explores women’s ongoing impact in STEM and how a hashtag is driving the Pi Day conversation to representation of women in the field:

Natasha Kulviwat, having been interested in neuroscience and mental health from an early age, noticed that neuroscience wasn’t making as much progress in mental health diagnoses and interventions as she thought it should.

So, the 17-year-old from Jericho High School in Jericho, New York embarked on a search for a biomarker related to suicide, wondering if there was a way to use neuroscience to identify those at risk.

Kulviwat looked at brain tissue for those who died by suicide and found there was an increase in a protein biomarker in suicide decedents. The biomarkers could also identify genetic vulnerabilities that could lead to suicidal ideation. 

So, for instance, pathologists could find spikes in the protein biomarkers and, along with a self-report questionnaire, could catalyze suicide prevention in the future.

“My research serves as a small puzzle piece that will hopefully advance the way we view diagnostics for suicide in the future,” Kulviwat said.

For William Gao, his research is personal. Three of his grandparents, who lived in rural China with sparse access to health care, were diagnosed with cancer. 

“Poor health care meant late diagnoses,” Gao said. “And late diagnoses meant grim prognoses.”

During his research, 18-year-old Gao noticed that shortages in pathologists around the world cause long diagnosis times, especially in developing countries. He said this elevates mortality rates in breast cancer patients, for example.

To tackle these health care disparities, the teen from Centennial High School in Ellicott City, Maryland, developed an AI diagnostic tool to support doctors and hospitals in the diagnosis process. Rather than sending tissue samples to a separate lab, with long wait times for results, Gao’s app creates a heat map, then and there, of a biopsied tissue revealing exactly what part of the tissue sample could be malignant.

Knowing where to look in a tissue sample could vastly speed up the diagnostic process, Gao said. And, not only that — the app ameliorates the risks associated with patient privacy, since it eliminates the process of transferring patient data between institutions.

Gao said that this is a noteworthy step towards offering more equitable health care outcomes, and he sees room to collaborate with the venture and entrepreneur space to scale the app. 

“I hope it can be applied in rural areas which can create a real impact and really have an ability to support patients around the world,” he said.

Gavriela Beatrice Kalish-Schur knew from an early age that STEM was for her. But it was in high school that she knew she wanted to specialize in neuroscience, “I think because we know so little about the brain,” she said.

She also knew that anxiety impacts many young people, and that current therapies aren’t as effective as they could be, or they’re very expensive — or both.

The 18-year-old senior at Julia R. Masterman High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, said she was interested in understanding what’s happening on a cellular level with anxiety to help inform the development of more effective treatments.

Her experiment: Make fruit flies anxious. She targeted a certain brain pathway called IRE1, knocking it down in the flies. “Knocking down is like turning down the volume when you’re listening to music,” she explained. 

Then she observed their behavior. And like the proverbial wallflower at a school dance, the fruit flies clung to the wall of the petri dish, rather than spread over the surface as they normally would. In other words, the flies exhibited anxious behavior.

Kalish-Schur discovered that these flies had different protein levels than the control group. Understanding the relationship between the IRE1 pathway and anxiety, she said, can lead to more targeted treatments for anxiety in humans. 

”We can use what we already know and new techniques to develop cures for diseases that harm a lot of people,” Kalish-Schur said.

Ever since he was an elementary schooler, David Lu Cao, now a high school senior, was always fascinated by the question, “How did life on Earth begin?” 

That’s when his father bought him a telescope for his birthday. Seeing the planets and distant objects “was a pivotal moment,” said Cao, an 18-year-old student at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia.

In 2017, astronomers discovered the first space rock, named ‘Oumuamua, originating from another solar system. 

“This mysterious asteroid or comet got me thinking about the possibility that similar objects may have spread life across our universe,” he said. In other words, could life on Earth have been started by these objects?

This process, called Panspermia, is one of the theories of the origins of life on Earth. It posits that single-celled organisms — or the building blocks of life — could survive for billions of years inside these objects and seed the earth with life.

Cao created a mathematical model, and used data about the quantity of these objects over a given period of time and space. 

He discovered that there’s a 0.001% chance of Panspermia being responsible for life on earth. 

“However, given that there are billions of habitable exoplanets in our galaxy alone….this number is actually not too small,” he said.

Cao hopes to one day work for NASA or other organizations like Space X “to take humanity to new heights,” he said.

Nearly 40 million people in the developing world need prosthetics, but only about 5% have access to them. Arav Bhargava, an 18-year-old senior at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia, said that there are two main reasons for this: First, that prosthetics are prohibitively expensive; Second, that there is a significant barrier to access to professionals for fitting and maintenance. 

“That really isn’t feasible in developing countries,” he said.

In response, Bhargava developed a universal fit, 3D-printed prosthetic for amputees missing their forearms in the form of a kit consisting of all necessary components. 

“Each amputee would be able to take a kit for themselves, and have a prosthetic for the rest of their lives,” he said.

The goal is to keep each kit under $40.

Bhargava plans to develop partnerships to further scale and distribute his kits for the roughly 40 million people in need. 

“It’s not that the boys weren’t welcoming to me,” she said. “It was more that I didn’t see other girls in the classroom.”

Rebecca, a 17-year-old from San Jose, California, decided to do something about it. Her app, Dare to Dream, aims to inspire girls and young women to go into coding. 

Her app presents a gallery of historical and contemporary women in STEM and shows facts about gender parity, like the statistic that 30% of those who take the Advanced Placement Computer Science course are women. It also links to resources like where girls can get involved in coding.

Rebecca’s friend suggested that she submit to Apple’s Swift Student Challenge, a competition for student software developers. She was among 375 students who won this year. Rebecca hopes to grow the app’s reach and have it translated into multiple languages. 

For the future, Rebecca wants to found a startup that focuses on issues such as gender parity. 

“I wanted to be a person and a changemaker that other girls can admire,” she said.

“When I was a kid, the superpower I’ve always wanted was to fly,” she said. “Aviation was the closest thing I could get to that.”

But her journey wasn’t easy. Obtaining a pilot’s license costs thousands — if not tens of thousands — of dollars in coursework and flight time. To fund her training, Angela put a lot of energy into searching for scholarships. The more time she spent in aviation, however, the more she started to notice that most people in the industry don’t look like her.

So she sought to help aspiring pilots, especially women and people of color, gain access to aviation by developing an app, , to connect them with a marketplace of scholarships to offset the daunting cost of flight training.

Another one of her apps, , is an Apple Watch product that provides a real-time guide to administer CPR, and it won the 2022 Apple Swift Student Challenge, which tasks students with creating an “.” She was invited to Apple headquarters where she met Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Angelina says she wants to continue working on projects that make the world a better place. 

“Global problems have local roots,” she said. “And by tackling a small problem within your general community… you can impact a global problem.”

Click here to see & share Tsuboi’s story — and check out this other recent coverage of teenagers breaking new ground in STEM: 

Watch: 17-Year-Old Makes History By Sequencing Genome of Pet Fish

A Teen’s Research on Bees’ Memory Is Helping Avert Colony Collapse Disorder

Florida Teen Invents World’s First Sustainable Electric Vehicle Motor

14-Year-Old Wins $25,000 Prize For Robotic Hand He Built For Less Than $100

Meet the 16 Under 16 in STEM Achievers

—Produced & Edited by Jim Fields

Working at biohacking space BioCurious, he successfully mapped the genetic code of his pet fish and submitted it to the National Library of Medicine’s Center for Biotechnology Information. 

Indeever’s passion for biomedical research is inspired by a passion for STEM education. 

“STEM, of course, is really important to me,” he says, “because it gives me the tools to solve and answer questions in the world around us.”

Click here to see & share Madireddy’s story — and check out this other recent coverage of teenagers breaking new ground in STEM: 

• A Teen’s Research on Bees’ Memory Is Helping Avert Colony Collapse Disorder

• Florida Teen Invents World’s First Sustainable Electric Vehicle Motor

• 14-Year-Old Wins $25,000 Prize For Robotic Hand He Built For Less Than $100

• Meet the 16 Under 16 in STEM Achievers

—Produced & Edited by Jim Fields

The teen from San Jose, California, dug deeper, discovering in her research that harmful pesticides can damage the honey bees’ learning and memory. Impaired bees can’t harvest pollen well and have a hard time finding their way back to the hive.

With the help of a local beekeeper, Hu set out an experiment to mollify these effects. She created artificial flowers tinged with caffeine and a food supplement called T-Polyphenol. The experiment intended to use the compounds to improve the bees’ memories. Her experiment worked. The bees thrived. 

Rory won the Department of Defense STEM Talent Award of $10,000 for her experiment at the 2022 Broadcom MASTERS, a national science and engineering competition for middle school students. “Knowing that I would even be able to have a small part in [solving the problem],” she says, “it would be extremely gratifying to me.”

Click here to see & share Hu’s story — and check out this other recent coverage of teenagers breaking new ground in STEM: 

• Florida Teen Invents World’s First Sustainable Electric Vehicle Motor
• 14-Year-Old Wins $25,000 Prize For Robotic Hand He Built For Less Than $100
• Meet the 16 Under 16 in STEM Achievers

—Produced & Edited by Jim Fields

With that in mind, the 14-year-old from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, built a robot hand controlled by a glove. “It has a lot of applications,” he says, “but primarily for search and rescue.” The user’s movements are copied to the robot intuitively. And he built it all for less than $100. (See the robot in action right here)

For his invention, he won the Samueli Foundation Prize of $25,000 at the 2022 Broadcom MASTERS, a national science and engineering competition for middle school students. He says he’ll use the prize for college tuition.

Share Thomas’s story — and check out this other recent coverage of teenagers breaking new ground in STEM: 

• Florida Teen Invents World’s First Sustainable Electric Vehicle Motor
  
• California Teen Creates App to Help Kids Struggling With Food Allergies
  
• Meet the 16 Under 16 in STEM Achievers

—Produced & Edited by Jim Fields

Today, we give center stage to Zidaan Kapoor, a homeschooled 15-year-old from Redwood City, California who knows a thing or two about the anxiety that comes with having food allergies. Zidaan was diagnosed with life-threatening food allergies when he was just a toddler, but it wasn’t until his most recent bout that he truly understood the dangers. 

“The aftermath was something I never experienced,” he says. “It was debilitating anxiety.  I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t trust my family members [to prepare food for me].”

So he developed an app called Fight Fears to solve this problem for both himself and his peers. Through a series of questions, the app analyzes the user’s anxiety level. Based on that, users get challenges to complete to quell that anxiety, with the goal of allowing users to feel more in control of their allergy fears. Zidaan also founded and operates a math and chess tutoring business for other youth.

But right now, he says he’s most concerned about social justice, climate change and mental health: “I’m kind of using all of this as a baseline to move forward in a way that I can discover as I move along.”

See our full interview — and celebrate our full 2022 class! 

—Video edited by James Fields and produced by Emmeline Zhao

But his latest project aims to solve a global problem: the unsustainability of electric car motors, which use rare earth materials that are nonrenewable, expensive, and pollute the environment during the mining and refining process. (Click here to watch more about Robert’s journey) 

To develop a solution, Sansone took inspiration from the synchronous reluctance motor, an electrical rotating machine that converts the electrical power into mechanical power. The motor is currently used in industrial applications, doesn’t utilize rare earth materials, but also doesn’t produce the power needed to propel electric cars. It took 15 prototypes for the teen to produce an engine that yielded sufficient power, and he’s now on to working on the 16th iteration of the motor, which he hopes can produce even more energy.

For his work, Sansone won a $75,000 scholarship in the 2022 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. He says he’ll use his winnings to help pay for his bachelor’s degree.

In this 74 Interview, Sansone talks about the obstacles he faced and the breakthroughs he achieved on his journey toward building the world’s first sustainable electric vehicle motor.

We met an inspired 15-year-old STEM activist, Kavya Venkatesan, from Old Bridge, New Jersey who believes innovation and STEM can solve social issues affecting everything from bias in healthcare to sustainability. Kavya is also dedicated to building the nation’s female STEM workforce pipeline

She has developed strategies to mitigate the impact of climate change on her home state by creating an app, NJ X Connect, that connects individuals in low-income, coastal communities with flood relief organizations and resources in the event of an emergency. “Because right now, our strategy in those communities should be helping them be more resilient,” she said.

Kavya’s second app, Helios, a heat advisory system, aims to educate users about their risk of being hospitalized from heat strokes.

Her passion for STEM as a means of social change led her to the national organization Society of Women Engineers, where she brings industry professionals and students together to develop solutions for social change.

“I realized diversity, equity and inclusion — it has to be something that we need to focus more on in the STEM field,” Kavya said.

See our full interview — and celebrate our full 2022 class! 

Today we’re spotlighting 14-year-old Steven Hoffen, who attends the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, New York. 

A pre-pandemic visit to Sindyanna of Galilee, a nonprofit in Israel where Jewish and Arab women work together to foster social change and cultivate hydroponic gardens, inspired Steven to produce a short documentary telling the story of their efforts.

“What really caught my attention was Hadas [Lahav], who was a Jewish [woman] cooperating with Hanaan [Zoabi], who’s an Arab woman,” he said. “And so that really got my interest in all of their projects.”

Steven was especially interested in Sindayanna’s hydroponics, a form of vertical farming that doesn’t require soil or specific climate conditions. As Steven describes it, climate change has caused drier conditions and reduced availability of fertile land in Israel.

Inspired by a David Attenborough nature documentary his family watched on Netflix, Steven produced a documentary, “Growing Peace in the Middle East.” The film was recognized at numerous film festivals and prompted Hoffen to launch a nonprofit, Growing Peace, which is dedicated to using hydroponics “as a medium to educate, empower and help those in need.”

He also raised money to build a hydroponics system for a food bank in Israel that is primarily for Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers. 

“[Hadas] said that since my film has been [shown] in different film festivals, 20 more women have joined the hydroponics project,” Steven said. “That really just made me happy.”

See our full interview — and celebrate our full 2022 class!

—Video edited by James Fields and produced by Emmeline Zhao

Lydia has life-threatening allergies and suffers from severe anxiety, which causes her hair and nails to fall out. “So much of her life feels out of her control, but instead of letting these things overwhelm her or define her, she uses them as fuel for inventions,” said her nominator and mother, Covey Denton, a K-8 STEM specialty teacher.

One example: Lydia created what she calls a “Halcyon Bracelet” to help with body-focused repetitive behaviors, which plagued her during the COVID quarantine. She’s also invented a “Beat the Heat Car Seat” that can tell when a child has been left in a car, and initiates a call to emergency services if the temperature in the vehicle becomes dangerously hot.

The teen also works to reduce e-waste, and co-founded Regame Inc., a nonprofit that collects, repairs and redistributes used gaming systems and tablets to keep them from piling up in landfills. 

Above and beyond her creations and innovations, Denton also continues to speak to school groups and programs for girls to promote greater female interest and representation in STEM.

Watch our full interview — and celebrate our full 2022 class!

—Video edited by James Fields and produced by Emmeline Zhao

Today, we’re casting a spotlight on 16-year-old Sydney Vaughn who we met in San Jose, California this past spring. Vaughn’s life has long been surrounded by medicine — not because it runs in the family, as no one in her immediate or extended family is in the medical field — but because her 15-year-old brother has special needs and has had 20 surgeries since birth.

For years, Sydney spent nearly every day after school accompanying her brother to appointments, which included cardiology, orthopedics, ophthalmology, dermatology and pulmonology, among others. She did exercises with him during physical therapy, practiced making words with him in speech therapy and watched him sit in the sound booth for hearing tests.

“From a young age, I was blessed to witness countless medical professionals work to help my brother,” Sydney said. “I hope to follow this template by dedicating my life’s work to patients and their families.”

Two years ago, Sydney moved with her family from Texas to San Jose, where the homeless population grew by 11% during the pandemic. During that period, Sydney led a project to study and tackle medical care for the homeless in her new community. 

See our full interview — and celebrate our full 2022 class!

—Video edited by James Fields and produced by Emmeline Zhao