STEM of the Year 2000

Gitanjali Rao is the TIME's first ever Kid of the Year. After building technology to tackle contaminated drinking water to opoid addiction, she has continued to inspire young people to solve some of the world's toughest problems. As an advocate for STEM, Gitanjali has inspired over 50,000 students globally.

At 12 years old, Nicholas Milahilou founded PlayPixel. Leading the development of three-hit mobile games: "Puzzle Dash" "Avoid it!" and "Dice Shaker", Nick quickly gained over 250,000 downloads in over 50 countries, as one of the youngest Aussie Developers on the App Store. Nick was invited to meet with the Head of the App Store and to attend exclusive Apple App Store and Apple Arcade events. Today, Nicholas is now the Founder and CEO of Appstra, an app-development agency working with the hottest startups in Australia.

In July 2020, Samantha Ouyang founded a non-profit called Superposition Toronto, dedicated to bridging the gender gap in STEM. Since then, they've supported 33,000 young people in 80 countries across all continents with their workshops, panels, and contests. They've made accessible educational opportunities on STEM topics that aren’t taught in schools, such as AI, blockchain, gene editing, and bionics; and fostered an environment for young women to build their confidence.Samantha has also founded called AeroPure, a company which uses polysaccharide aerogels to filter industrial waste from drinking water. Samantha is also working to publish a research paper on smart contract verification with a professor and PhD students at the University of Waterloo.

Sigil Wen is an 18 year old founder who tokenised himself to crowdfund his gap year before University of Pennsylvania, enabling him to move to Silicon Valley to pursue building Monument, a decentralised NFT platform for crowdfunding emerging talent. Previously he founded BitSwap, a cryptocurrency exchange that grew to a team of 10 in a few months. Sigil is an inspiration to many young people who want to make life in their own terms and explore the world of tech.

Yuma Soerianto is a 5X Apple WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) scholarship and Swift Student Challenge winner. At ten years old, Yuma was the youngest scholarship winner at WWDC17. Since then, Yuma has published 10 apps, won awards for two of them and regularly speaks at international conferences. Yuma also teaches coding on the YouTube channel, Anyone Can Code. With almost 15,000 subscribers, Yuma is an inspiration for many young people out there looking to take their first steps into STEM.

Zach Latta is the co-founder and executive director of Hack Club, where he works to bring coding clubs to high schools worldwide. By the time he turned 17, Zach haddropped out of high school to work in tech and built the backend architecture for Yo – an app with more than 3 million users. Not long after, over 5 million people were using his software. Today, Hack Club provides baseline coding curriculum, software tools, and community-building training to 14,000 students in 400 high school clubs. Many of the websites or apps that members of Hack Clubs have built are on display on its site. There’s Kenko, for example, that describes itself as “shazam for food,” where you take a photo of any food and receive health insights. In 2020, Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation donated $500,000 to help expand Hack Club,[8] and donated another $1,000,000 in 2021.