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This podcast is a deep-dive into one incredible invention, entrepreneurial pursuit, or discovery per episode and the young person behind it. Did you know that the trampoline was invented by a 16-year-old? That popsicles, snowmobiles, and even the Braille language were also invented by young people? In this podcast we’re talking to innovative kids, tweens, and teens who run their own businesses, made a new discovery, or invented something new using science. For season two, our host Stephanie ...
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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.…
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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.By Seeker and TRAX from PRX
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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 s…
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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.By Seeker and TRAX from PRX
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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 guidelin…
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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.…
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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 analy…
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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 t…
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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 r…
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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 a…
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Jonathan Tamen wants to be an upstander and not a bystander, and so far, he’s succeeding. He and his twin brother founded Helping Hands MB (https://www.helpinghandsmb.org/), a nonprofit whose mission is to change children’s lives through 3D-printed prosthetic limbs. After extensive quality checks, their first shipment of prosthetics is on its way t…
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When 14-year-old Sarah Park moved a close family member to tears by playing the violin for them, she realized the huge potential that music can have on a person’s emotions. She created Spark Care+ (https://www.thesparkcare.com/) to harness the healing power of music therapy and create personalized experiences powered by artificial intelligence.…
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Get ready for Genius Generation Season 2!By Seeker and TRAX from PRX
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Nala is the creator of the non-profit organization MyHairLove. Her mission is teaching younger black children how to care for their natural hair while breaking stigmas and negative stereotypes at the same time. She plans to do this through YouTube, educational “hair kits,” and live workshops with elementary and middle school aged children.…
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Anugreh, at just 17 years old founded a technology company called Hybrid Idea to solve some of the problems he saw in his home country of India. But his company isn’t just dedicated to one interest. Everything from visual impairment to autism to clean water, Anugreh has taken them all on.By Seeker and TRAX from PRX
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Emily and Kyle are a brother and sister duo who founded an environmental advocacy organization called Clear Water Innovation (https://www.clearwaterinnovation.org/) that’s dedicated to solving the global water crisis. Through their organization, they encourage young people to solve environmental problems. Emily and Kyle are also quite the pair of s…
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When Victoria was 13 years old she had an epiphany at a speech and debate summer camp where her peer mentor, Ashna supercharged her learning experience. When Victoria and Ashna realized how powerful peer-to-peer mentorship could be they knew they wanted to spread that power to others. The result is the organization STEM & Buds (https://www.stemandb…
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Peter was a freshman in high school when he learned that monarch butterflies are disappearing at an alarming rate, so he decided to act. He formed an organization called Homes4Monarchs (https://homes4monarchs.wixsite.com/milkweed) which has distributed 10s of 10,000s of milkweed seed packets all around his native city of Chicago. If you've never he…
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Ever since she was a little girl, Gia Mar Ramos had an interest in computer science and technology, but as she got older she noticed something: there were very few girls in her technology classes… so Gia decided to do something about that. The summer before high school she started a non-profit organization called Girl Innovation (https://www.girlin…
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Caleb Anderson is a college student studying aerospace engineering at the prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology. Did we mention Caleb is 12? Yeah, Caleb has always been pretty smart. He was learning fractions at two years old, and had already qualified for Mensa by age three… one of the youngest people to ever do so. Now that he’s pursuing hi…
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For as long as she can remember, 14-year-old Anna Du has had a deep love for the ocean. One day while collecting sea glass, Anna had an epiphany about how much plastic was polluting it. And she got to work. Since her realization Anna has developed an underwater robot that can detect microplastics deep in the ocean, started developing a model to pre…
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Max Feldman believes the key to saving our planet is educating the next generation about the problems facing our environment today. And so that’s exactly what he does with his organization The Tomorrow Project (https://www.tomorrowprojectus.org/). They put on in-person and virtual workshops for kids all over the country to learn about the importanc…
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At just 16 years old Adithi Raghavan founded her organization BEEducated (https://www.thebeeducated.org/) when she learned just how serious the plight of the honeybee is (their populations are declining sharply). Through BEEducated, Adithi has created “The Million Pollinator Garden Challenge” to empower young people all over the country to create b…
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When Sophia Kianni was in middle school she took a trip to visit relatives in Iran. She was shocked by the levels of pollution she saw there. The more she looked into it, the more alarmed she became. The effects of climate change are particularly extreme in the Middle East. And yet when Sophia brought up her concerns to her relatives, she discovere…
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From a very early age, Devin Martin has been obsessed with space. In the summer of 2020, Devin made his dream come true completing a summer internship at NASA and working directly on the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover. Watching the rover successfully launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was a huge triumph for Devin, but his journey hasn’t …
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Chander Payne had a life changing moment in his high school cafeteria (how many of us can say that?). He noticed his fellow classmates didn’t have access to healthy foods like fruit and vegetables - so he decided to grow them himself. Chander started an urban farm at his high school, growing fresh fruits and veggies right where they were needed the…
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The summer before her freshman year of high school, Kyla Guru discovered a unique passion for cybersecurity at the NSA GenCyber Camp. It was there she discovered that 90% of cyberattacks were due to human error. To combat this problem, Kyla founded Bits N’ Bytes Cybersecurity Education (https://www.bitsnbytes.us.com/) whose mission is educating and…
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When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and schools closed, high school junior Zachary Siegel found himself with a lot more time on his hands. He used that free time to explore his passions (like computer programming), but quickly realized this was also an opportunity to share his passions with others. So he founded The Youth Passion Project (https://www.yo…
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When Hannah Lucas was 15 years old, she developed POTS, a medical condition that caused her to faint without warning. The anxiety around her condition combined with bullying and harassment from her classmates led Hannah to fall into a deep depression, culminating in an attempt to end her own life. During this incredibly low moment in her life, Hann…
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While studying abroad in Japan, 16-year-old Luna Abadia saw the effects of climate change first-hand. Typhoons were getting stronger, snow becoming rarer, and traditional crops were no longer able to grow. This inspired Luna to act. She entered a speech competition and wrote about the importance of combating climate change. Her speech got a lot of …
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When he was 11 years old, a volunteer trip to a center feeding the homeless and hungry in San Francisco opened Kiran Sridhar’s eyes to the devastating effects of hunger and food insecurity. After a lot of research and even more hard work, Kiran’s drive to eradicate hunger led to the creation of his online platform, Waste No Food (http://wastenofood…
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When 16-year-old Neil Suri went on a hiking trip to California, he witnessed firsthand the devastation caused by forest fires. The image of the charred mountainside inspired him to look deeper into wildfires - how they start, and how they burn out of control. Through his research, Neil discovered the way we detect forest fires hasn’t changed all th…
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Very early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, 18-year-old Avi Schiffmann recognized people needed a quick and easy way to get accurate information about the spread of the disease. So Avi put his computer programming skills to use and created nCoV2019.live - one of the world’s very first coronavirus trackers. The site quickly became an invaluable resource…
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15-year-old Anisha Musti isn’t your average teenager. After she lost her great-uncle to Parkinson’s disease, she was inspired to do something to help others. Using the power of quantum computing, Anisha created a revolutionary technique to detect Parkinson’s disease based solely on the sound of a person’s voice. Now, Anisha runs a non-profit organi…
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When Ananya Sridhar was 12 years old she heard about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Despite being 2,000 miles away in California, Ananya decided to act. Not only did Ananya invent a new, affordable way to test for lead contamination in water, she figured out how to identify the communities that are most at risk. To learn more about Ananya’s w…
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Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to change the world? From creating a robot that can sniff out plastic in the ocean to coding an algorithm that detects Parkinson's disease, our host Danni Washington sits down with inventors, entrepreneurs, and explorers to hear the stories behind their amazing discoveries. Oh, and there’s one more thi…
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