The Genius Generation

After witnessing a mismatch in food bank donations — massive lines at one, and barely any supply at others — Tavish Sharma created Solve Hunger (https://www.solvehungercorp.org/). His app aims to address food shortages and rally communities around their local food banks, and it’s already recruited over 60 food banks, pantries, and soup kitchens.

Representation matters to Emily Flores. She founded Cripple Media (https://cripplemedia.com/) to train and uplift young, disabled journalists. She and her staff mythbust misconceptions, call out ableism, and write about the issues they care about most.

Neil Deshmukh learned the hard way that building trust with a community is crucial to an invention’s success. He developed PlantumAI (https://www.neildeshmukh.com/plantumai) to help farmers in India connect with researchers at agricultural universities to diagnose and treat plant diseases. His app has now detected disease in over 3,000 plants and saved countless farmers’ crops.

Khloe Thompson is an expert at giving back. As the founder of Khloe Kares (https://www.khloekares.com/), she has given out basic resources to people experiencing homelessness since she was 8. She is also the designer of PeachTree Pads, which are sustainable and eco-friendly menstrual pads.

Hand-washing is an easy way to prevent the spread of germs, but many people (even doctors!) aren’t doing it correctly. Samyak Shrimali created Sanjeevani, a system to solve this problem in hospitals. Sanjeevani combines sensors and a computer model to track whether health care workers wash their hands according to World Health Organization guidelines.

A concussion left Ela Gokcigdem with time on her hands and plenty of ideas. Drawing from white noise therapy that helped her recover, she designed ePearl Technologies, a wireless, noise-canceling pair of earbuds made from recyclable materials. Since then, she’s become involved in climate activism and documentary filmmaking.

Inspired by the challenges that paralyzed people like Stephen Hawking face when communicating, Varun Chandrashekhar designed SpeakUp (https://www.varunchandrashekhar.com/research/research/speakup). His invention is a speech aid that picks up on a person’s brain and translates those impulses into speech. The device relies on a kind of computer analysis called machine learning, which Varun taught himself.

What if there were a way to biodegrade plastic, instead of having it collect in landfills and pollute oceans? Angela Zhan discovered bacteria that can do just that. The microscopic organisms that she found naturally eat up plastic, turning it into much more environmentally friendly products. Next, she’s scaling up her experiments from lab beakers to an entire bioreactor.

At 15, Lino Marrero is already a serial entrepreneur: his inventions include the String Ring and the Sole Solution. Most recently, he designed a prototype for the Kinetic Kickz 2.0, a shoe insert that converts physical activity into an electrical current that can charge a cellphone. One day, he hopes to perfect his invention and hook the world on renewable kinetic energy.

One day at softball practice, Mary Catherine Hanafee LaPlante noticed that noxious pesticides and herbicides were being sprayed on the field directly next to her. After arming herself with information and scientific research, she founded Speak Up Green Up (https://www.speakupgreenup.org/) to lobby her district to swap in less harmful alternatives and encourage others to do the same.