Adyant Bhavsar won the 2023 Lemelson Award for Invention as part of Society for Science’s Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge. A seventh grader at the Challenger School in San Jose, CA, Adyant hopes to work as an environmental engineer. “I want to contribute my skills toward finding solutions for environmental challenges, such as deforestation and pollution,” he says.

“Wildfires are becoming common nowadays, especially with climate change,” notes Adyant, adding that “a lot of days when you go outside, there’s smoke in the air. Last summer, we got an alert to be ready to evacuate from a wildfire that was close to our neighborhood.” The whole experience got Adyant thinking about how we could advance early monitoring for wildfires.

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Follow up: Adyant was selected to be Valedictorian of his 2024 graduating class. Congratulations, Adyant!