Three Indian-origin students have been named in Time magazine’s list of 25 most influential teens of 2018.
Kavya Kopparapu, Rishab Jain and Amika George have been named among youngsters who have made a global impact through their work and passion across numerous fields.
Fourteen-year-old US student Rishab Jain has been recognised for developing a software tool that can be a potential game-changer in the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, thus improving treatments.
The eighth-grader from Oregon won the top prize at Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge earlier this year.
14-year-old Rishab Jain has developed a software program that can help improve treatments for pancreatic cancer. Source: Twitter
“I’ve gotten to see how doctors can make an immediate difference in people’s lives,” Time quoted Jain as saying, “so I want to continue pursuing that.”
Jain’s compatriot 18-year-old Kavya Kopparapu developed a deep-learning computer system that can scan slides of tissues of brain cancer patients to monitor density, colour, texture and cellular alignment.
A freshman at Harvard University, Kavya was inspired to embark on this project after reading up on late Senator John McCain’s aggressive brain cancer known as glioblastoma last year and that the survival rate for the disease hadn’t improved in the last three decades.
“I thought, Why is that?” she says. “We have so much innovation that it didn’t make sense that we hadn’t gotten better.”
Her system has already been granted a provisional patent and she is now hoping to collaborate with neuropathologists to begin clinical trials of the system at Georgetown University.
Kavya Kopparapu with former US Vice President, Joe Biden at the Biden Cancer summit in September 2018. Source: Twitter
She is also the founder of a non-profit that works to bring computing opportunities to girls in northern Virginia and Washington, DC areas.
Unlike Kavya and Rishab, 19-year-old UK-based Amika George has been recognised for her activism and advocacy for eradicating, what she calls, period poverty.
Last year she led a protest of 2,000 people outside the British Prime Minister’s residence, calling for funding for the distribution of menstrual products to those who couldn’t afford to buy them.
She launched a petition that was signed by over 200,000 people which gained the attention of dozens of policymakers and finally resulted in funding allocation.
Amika George Source: Twitter
However, Amika says she isn’t done yet.
“We can’t trust our policymakers to take action on issues that seem so obvious to us,” she says. “If we want to see change, it falls on us to create that change.”
