Gitanjali Rao

At 15, she became TIME’s first-ever Kid of the Year after inventing tools to detect lead in water and diagnose opioid addiction.

At 10 years old, Gitanjali Rao was watching the news with her parents when she saw the Flint water crisis unfold.

She started researching carbon nanotube sensor technology, the kind of molecular science that usually lives in academic journals and MIT labs.

She was in elementary school.

By 12, she invented Tethys, a Bluetooth-enabled, carbon nanotube-based device that detects lead in drinking water.

She built it with a 9-volt battery, a lead-sensing unit, a processor, and her own code.

She called it Tethys after the Greek goddess of clean water.

In 2017, it won her the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge and $25,000.

But that was just her warm-up.

She kept asking: What else can we fix?

Well…

In 2019, she invented Epione, a diagnostic tool for early-stage opioid addiction.

It detects elevated protein levels tied to the mu opioid receptor gene.

In 2020, she launched Kindly, an AI-powered app and Chrome extension that detects cyberbullying in real time.

It lets users pause, edit, and rethink their words.

Today, it’s supported by UNICEF and being developed as an open-source Digital Public Good with global rollout in multiple languages.

All of this made her TIME’s first-ever Kid of the Year at just 15.
Gitanjali created an innovation framework (Observe, Brainstorm, Research, Build, Communicate) and turned it into global workshops.

She’s led them in 40+ countries through museums, schools, rural STEM clubs, and refugee education centers.

She’s mentored over 100,000 students.

One 45-minute session led a student to invent a shoe that calls 911.

To scale her reach, she wrote two books:
- A Young Innovator’s Guide to STEM (2021)
- A Young Innovator’s Guide to Planning for Success (2024)

Meanwhile, she’s quietly stacked one of the most impressive research resumes of any young scientist alive.

Internships and research placements:
- Denver Water Lab (portable lead testing using doped carbon nanotubes)
- Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (non-coding gene impact on protein expression)
- University of Colorado Denver (protein diagnostics for opioid addiction)
- MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research (extended release vaccines + lung tumor targeting)
- MIT Langer Lab (bioengineering therapeutics)
- Lockheed Martin (biological systems for long-term space travel)

She also joined the Colorado Attorney General’s office to help shape opioid response strategy.

And when she wasn’t researching, coding, teaching, or speaking, she got her pilot’s license.

She’s now a student at MIT, studying biological engineering and business.

And in 2025, she won the inaugural Stephen Hawking Junior Medal for Science Communications.