This recording was made in 2016 when Deepika was a 17-year-old freshman at Harvard University. An inspiring story about the power of Science / Technology / Engineering /Math, Deepika relates how on family trips to India as a child she often saw children forced to drink dirty water — as a result, at age 14, she became determined to find to a way to ensure that everyone has access to safe drinking water. For an 8th grade project, the Nashua, New Hampshire teen invented a water purification system that uses a photocatalytic composite and sunlight to clean water — an invention that earned her recognition as America’s Top Young Scientist in 2012. And that’s just the beginning.
Access to clean water is a global crisis. “One-ninth of the global population lacks access to clean water,” she explains “and 500,000 children die every year because of water-related diseases.” On the trips to India, her immigrant parents’ native land, Deepika saw the struggle for clean water first hand: “[My parents] would have to boil the water before we drank it. I also saw children on the streets of India… take these little plastic bottles and they’re forced to fill it up with the dirty water they see on the street. And they’re forced to drink that water because they don’t have another choice. And then I go back to America and I can instantly get tap water.”
Deepika developed a filtration system using a photocatalyst — a substance that reacts with water’s impurities when energized by the sun — that also filters the water.
Her efforts were widely recognized — in addition to being named America’s Top Young Scientist in the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge, she was also the recipient of the 2013 President’s Environmental Youth Award and the 2014 U.S. Stockholm Junior Water Prize. In 2015, she was named one of Forbes Magazine’s 2015 “30 Under 30 in Energy” and received the National Geographic Explorer Award.
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Science, Technology, English Language Arts, Art
