Gitanjali Rao, A Young Innovator’s Guide to STEM: Neilly Series

An author, inventor, scientist, engineer, and STEM advocate, 17 year old Gitanjali Rao will be discussing her book A Young Innovator’s Guide to STEM, which gives students and educators an approach to the kinds of problems that old tools and techniques won’t solve.

Rao has many credits to her name including TIME’s first-ever “Kid of the Year,” a place on Forbes “30 Under 30” list, and America’s Top Young Scientist, a title she earned by winning the Young Scientist Challenge by Discovery Education and 3M.

As an innovator, Rao received a Presidential Environmental Protection Agency award for the “Tethys,” an early lead-detection tool. She is also the inventor of “Epione,” a device for early diagnosis of prescription opioid addiction, and “Kindly,” an anti-cyberbullying service using Al and Natural Language processing. Rao is currently conducting research on early detection of pathogens at the Broad Institute of MIT/Harvard.