STEM of the Year 2000

Alikhan is a Kazakhstani innovator who strives to build an inclusive society, paying attention to the inaccessibility of education, entrepreneurship, and volunteerism. Alikhan created a 2.5D game about astrobiology due to the unavailability of understandable materials for children. He founded a non-profit which provides free support from therapists and International Children's Rights Club through UNICEF. In the future, he wants to solve the problem of the inaccessibility of many materials for visually impaired people.

Allison is a climate activist and aspiring energy engineer from Peru. She’s passionate about the energy sector and climate change. She also wishes to create a way to make clean and renewable energy cheaper and easier to transport in order to find an affordable replacement for fossil fuels. Allison created a solar water heater with recyclable materials aimed to help under-resourced people access warm water. Allison believes that education in science and technology can change the world, and she hopes to help more Peruvian students access this education in the future.

Alyssa Carson, also known by the call sign Blueberry, is an American student with the goal of training to become an astronaut and to be selected for future human spaceflight to Mars. She attended U.S. Space Camp in 2008 and has also attended other space camps in Canada and Turkey. In 2013, NASA invited Alyssa to be on the MER 10 panel in Washington DC to discuss future missions to Mars live on NASA TV. In 2022 Alyssa was selected as one of five influencers in the world to work with NATO. She is also a member of The Explorers Club as the youngest full member accepted. Alyssa is passionate about increasing access to and opportunities in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) for girls and women.

Amanda is the founder of BackScoop, a free newsletter that makes it fun and easy to stay updated with Southeast Asian startup and tech news in just a few minutes each morning. They now have over 10,000 subscribers and have been featured by CNN.

Due to the family’s financial constraints, Tuyet, aged 8, was sent away to live with her grandparents, where she thankfully could continue her education. When she returned, she became the valedictorian at the best school in her province. Tuyet says that education has helped her become financially independent – an opportunity closed to many of her friends. Drawing on her experiences, she has started multiple initiatives to promote affordable education, directly benefiting 500 students and indirectly 80,000 students. These range from free academic tutoring, research training, and professional training in digital skills, as well as funding for educational resources for underprivileged schools.

Blessing Akpan envisions a system where quality education is accessible to every citizen and becomes the ship on which sustainable development is built. Her #1Child1Book campaign in 2018 improved literacy ability of over 100 rural children in Akwa Ibom State and counting. Today, Blessing has expanded passions to programming and coding. Blessing is a Scratch educator, introducing and enlightening kids about technology via the Scratch programming platform. As a Technovation mentor, she also trains and supports young girls to solve real world problems in local and global communities using technology.

Chandhana is a 17-year-old from India working towards making the future healthier and more sustainable, one step at a time. At 16, they worked on a project of gene editing and designing homologous recombination templates. In particular, with BRCA2, a human tumor suppressor gene aka breast cancer type 2 susceptibility protein responsible for repairing DNA

Diana "Nyamekye" Wilson, Founder & CEO of Black Sisters in STEM, is a highly successful 26-year-old social entrepreneur, former Googler, activist, and global speaker. Today they have trained 710+ young African women and has a +7k following. She is backed by companies such as Bank of America, Google, IBM, MTN, Corporate Finance Institute (CFI), Educative.io, etc. Diana has raised over $455k in sponsorships at this time as well as led her NGO to be in the United States, United Kingdom and 12 countries in Africa with representation from every region in Africa. Her goal is to reach 30,000 women by 2030.

Grace Brown is the Founder of Andromeda, a robotics startup seeking to develop a fleet of universal humanoid robots. Andromeda Robotics’ first prototype, Abi, is a companion robot who aims to alleviate feelings of loneliness from elderly residents in aged-care facilities through social interactions and hugs! To date, they have signed over $10million ARR in LOIs with Australia's largest service providers. They were the only Australian team accepted into the AWS Global Robotics Accelerator and received support from even the animator of Shrek.

Guido's dedication to the field of Synthetic Biology and the networks he’s nurtured have earned him a spot in Harvard University's Amgen Scholar Program. He has also won various awards for his engagement in Synthetic Biology and drug discovery, such as NOVA's award for Healthcare and Bio Sciences!Here you can find what I have done:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B-MK-6GVIAMYMxtQsweaG_XSIZDKBtMu/view?usp=sharingIn summary, my mission is to foster discoveries, working on chronic diseases. I have been working in synbio, AI, entrepreneurship and policy in the past. I want to launch a billionaire company and am working on building the infrastructure with that. All my activities can be found on Linkedin; the mission was quite personal and is present here.

Leanne’s invention, Finsen Headphones, looks to provide an antibiotic free, low-cost option to detect and treat a mid-ear infection using machine learning and blue light therapy. The use of Finson Headphones could potentially reduce the number of children who suffer from hearing loss by up to 60 percent. In 2022, Leanne was named Young Scientist of the Year

Luísa Franco Machado is a digital rights activist and a published data justice researcher from Brazil. Leveraging social media to mainstream their research findings for youth, they have gathered an online community of more than 60,000 young people worldwide. Luísa has facilitated discussions on tech policy, queer rights, and feminism, and their multilingual content has been viewed more than 10 million times. Breaking historical barriers, at age 16 Luísa was the first openly queer person to be elected as the President of the Brazilian Youth Parliament. At the 75th UN General Assembly they publicly advocated for youth participation in tech policy decisions. Luísa has also co-led key youth negotiations on data ethics at the European Dialogue on Internet Governance, and advanced AI and international development policy research at OECD and UN DESA.