Shanya Gill: TIME’s Child of the Year list

Shanya Gill couldn’t stop thinking about the restaurant behind her home in San Jose, California, that burned down in 2022. Neither could her family. His mother became paranoid and always checked to see if the stove was off.

Shanya, now 13, has learned that unsupervised cooking is the biggest factor in house fires – responsible for a third of incidents. She felt that smoke detectors were not always effective in providing urgent alerts, so she decided to create a device that would alert users to fires before they even started. “What I realized is that… I could learn to code and really make a change,” she says.

Shanya’s invention uses a thermal camera and a small computer to detect autonomous heat sources; if two minutes have passed and there is no sign of humans, it sends a message to the user to warn of a possible fire. This idea helped her win the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge, a prestigious science competition for high school students in the US. Her invention and leadership skills during a week in DC helped her beat out 2,000 other applicants for a $25,000 prize. (About 65,000 high school students compete in affiliated science fairs – and of those, the top 10% are eligible to enter the competition.) “That was kind of an aha! moment for me… Oh, I can really do this,” she says. The annual competition is organized by the Society for Science, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting equity in STEM by organizing science competitions and publishing a magazine.

Maya Ajmera, president of the Society for Science, says Shanya’s project stood out because it took advantage of an innovative way of using engineering to solve a real-life problem. According to the National Fire Protection Association, a quarter of the approximately 1.5 million fires in 2022 occurred in homes and caused more than 2,700 deaths – representing nearly three-quarters of the total number of civilian fire deaths in that year. year. Ajmera is also impressed with how Shanya has continued working. “She didn’t just stop with the project… she made connections with the community that is most impacted by it… the firefighters and the women who put out fires,” says Ajmera.

Shanya met Lori Moore-Merrell, who leads the US Fire Administrationat its headquarters in March. “I thought it would be a quick in and out thing,” says Shanya. But she was wrong. “She knew what my product was,” she adds. The federal agency is helping Shanya try to fund the app and launch it on a larger scale. Currently, the only test is at her home. But “the product is almost ready,” says Shanya.

An improvement came to her during the competition in DC. It realized that AI is much faster than Python, so it is changing programming. Shanya posted her code on GitHub, which is open source, so that people can make suggestions on how to improve the program, which still has some bugs. She did not want to patent the technology. “If I were the only creator, it would be difficult to get it everywhere,” she says. “But I just want other people to be safe — and I want people to feel safe in their own homes.”

Shanya says she used to struggle with insecurities linked to her body image and was called names because of her size. But in recent years, she has developed a healthier self-image and working on the project has helped her build confidence. “Innovation can have a big impact – not just on the people you help, but also on yourself,” she says.