STEM of the Year 2000

Nadja has positively changed the lives of thousands of people through her engineering, sustainability and intercultural work. She is the president of the ‘European Young Engineers’ (EYE), the largest European non-profit organisation of its kind that represents over 500,000 members, bridging the gap between policy and technology. Deeply passionate about saving the planet and its people, she believes engineering technologies are key to tackle grand challenges like global warming and COVID-19. As young engineers are often barely represented in youth activism or policy to date, she provides a platform to speak up and create innovative solutions.

Naila Moloo is a 16-year-old with the goal of making an impact in the sustainability sector. They're currently designing a transparent and flexible solar panels leveraging nanomaterials. They have already built out nanoparticle embedded silver nanowire electrodes and are synthesizing semi-transparent perovskites and exploring flexible substrates. Their other project is developing a bioplastic from duckweed through an internship at Pond Biomaterials.Naila is also the co-host of The Curiosity Podcast which centres around equipping younger generations (14-22-year-olds) with the skills they need to thrive. They bring on guests at the top of their fields, which span from exponential tech to mental health. They have now had people from the United Nations, Microsoft, SpaceX, NASA, and P&G, amongst other top companies/startups.

Niel Reitmann is building an online Distributed Autonomous Community (DAO) called Flaming Galahs. The project has brought together 5000 of the country's most ambitious students in a new kind of community that organises itself and creates value using web 3 technologies like NFTs, DAOs and social tokens.

Sarah Syed is an award-winning young scientist and innovator, who is designing a more sustainable method to remove oil spills from oceans using esterified pomegranate peels. Their scientific research has led them to speak at Canada's biggest AI conference (Big Data Toronto), the David Suzuki Foundation, HWY H2O, York University, and the Fora Global Summit. In 2022, they shared their work to over 7000 C-suite executives, researchers and young people across 7 countries. They are currently designing a more efficient rotating solar panel, which will leverage nanotech like graphene quantum dots and perovskites. Sarah Syed is also the founder of You Are the Change, which runs international hackathons and coding workshops. To date, they have empowered over 1000 young people to create solutions to the future whilst learning from leading tech experts at Microsoft. Sarah's work has been recognised as Diversity in Actions' 20 Under 20, 25 Under 25 Environmentalist in Canada, and as the youngest Developer in IBM Canada's 30 Under 30.

Uditi founded her non-profit organisation, ‘Elevate Tech’, with a mission to empower gender minorities – women and nonbinary people – in technology and entrepreneurship. She has now been running the organisation for nearly two years, leading a team of over 30 members internationally, impacting over 5,000 individuals in over 35 countries through various initiatives like the hackathons, fellowship programmes, mentorship programmes, workshops, and online Discord community. She continues to work at the intersection of technology and social justice to encourage more young girls to join STEM and ensure that no young girl is left behind due to lack of finances or opportunities.

Vinisha Umashankar is the inventor of the Solar Ironing Cart. After thinking seeing the amount of burnt charcoal thrown on the street by ironing vendors, Vinisha came up with an idea. Instead of using charcoal, they could use the sun. At 12 years old, they started designing a cart that had solar panels to power a steam iron. Now at 16, Vinisha has spoken at the U.N.'s climate change summit, COP26. In 2020, Umashankar won the Children's Climate Prize, a Swedish award for young innovators.

At 11 years old, Adam El Rafey is a change advocate, innovator and learning enthusiast that inspires others to follow their curiosities and find their voices at any age. Adam is a role model to young people globally, being one of the youngest TEDx speakers in the world and an advocate for amplifying more diverse voices in STEM.

Alishba Imran is a machine learning and blockchain developer who has a passion for leveraging technology to solve fundamental problems in our world. At age 14, she taught herself AI and blockchain programming. She co-founded Honestblocks, a blockchain platform to track medication and put an end to counterfeit medication in supply chain systems for 2 million people in rural India. This platform was eventually integrated into IBM Blockchain. Alishba is also working on Voltx - a machine learning software to accelerate the testing of energy storage devices from 3 months to 3 days, and is working as a developer at Hanson Robotics where she is improving the sensing, grasping, gripping of their robotic hands through various deep learning techniques.

Andrew Gao is the Founder of Helyx Initiative, a bioinformatics education nonprofit which has spread the love of STEM to over 3000 young people in 20+ countries

Audrey Pe is the Founder and CEO of WiTech, a nonprofit organisation which empower youth to break gender barriers using technology. With almost 15 chapters around the world, WiTech regularly runs women in tech conference (WiTCon) supporting students into careers in tech.

Calix Huang is a software engineer with a passion for startups and tech. As a high school junior, Calix founded Hours, a virtual studying platform for students. The study tool was used by more than 20,000 students across 120 countries including students from colleges and universities like Stanford University, MIT, Berkeley University and others. In just 8 months, Hours underwent a 6-figure acquisition with Fiveable. Prior to this, Calix founded Launch Tech LLC, which incubates student-focused ventures like Ortexo, NPO Core, and w3Hacks, all of which were acquired by NovaCrypt.Today, Calix is a Lead Product Manager at Fiveable, having had 2 of his companies acquired and featured on TechCrunch, Yahoo News, Business Insider, and Morning Brew.

In January 2019, Krisha, Eva and Emily, launched Fision Lens with a mission to create more affordable and accessible eyewear. Together, they are developing a thin, optical film that can adhere to an existing glasses lens to make inexpensive prescription updates. In 2020 alone, they raised over $40,000 funding from various competitions to develop their first prototype, and obtained a provisional patent.