Innovation starts with empathy: A Wknd chat with teenaged innovator Gitanjali Rao

She was nine years old and had just heard about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, on the news. Children in parts of that city, not that far from her home in Lone Tree, Colorado, were drinking water contaminated with lead, and nothing was being done about it.

Shouldn’t she at least try to help?

By the age of 11, she had taken her first steps to do so, designing a home-test kit that could potentially analyse water in real-time, to let families know whether it was contaminated or safe. The kit would be made up of carbon nanotubes that sent water-quality readings, via Bluetooth, to an app.

“I read this MIT article that said scientists were using carbon nanotubes to detect hazardous gases in the air. I thought, why not re-purpose this idea for water. I had no idea whether it would work or not,” Rao says.

She named it Tethys, after the Greek goddess of fresh water, and submitted the idea to a young-scientists contest sponsored by the innovation and manufacturing company 3M. When she won top spot, she used her $25,000 prize to build her first prototype.

Two years later, in 2019, Rao began working with the public utility company Denver Water, to refine that prototype. Months later, at 15, she made it to the cover of Time, as the magazine’s first-ever Kid of the Year (2020).

Rao is now 19, studying bioengineering (and business management) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and has added another feather to her cap. She recently won the first-ever Stephen Hawking Junior Medal for Science Communication.

Instituted by Hawking and the Starmus Foundation, recipients of the adult prize have included Christopher Nolan (2024), Jane Goodall (2022), Hans Zimmer (2016, for his work on Interstellar), and the creators of the TV show The Big Bang Theory (TBBT; in 2017).

Rao won for the same reason Nolan and the TBBT creators did: for her work to spread knowledge and enthusiasm about science and innovation.

She holds innovation workshops online, in collaboration with schools across 48 countries, including the UK, India, Kenya, Afghanistan, China, Nepal, Chile, UAE and Saudi Arabia. She holds sessions at refugee-camp education centres. She speaks, offline, to students across the US and beyond.

Her message is powerful: If you see curves where others see straight lines, science is for you. If you are alarmed by the climate crisis, the rise of AI or the growing polarisation in our world, know that there are solutions waiting to be invented, and you could be the one to work them out.

As examples, she cites her lead-detection device, as well as a web tool she launched in the pandemic, in collaboration with Unicef, that uses AI to help detect cyberbullying. (More on that in a bit.)

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It all began, for Rao, with a disappointing birthday gift, the year she turned four. She had been hoping to get a Barbie, and got a science kit instead.

She ended up spending more time with that kit than she ever would have with a doll, she says, laughing. She studied sliced strawberries under the microscope, and mixed vinegar and baking soda in beakers “until my mother showed me out of the kitchen for being unsanitary”.

By the time she heard about the problem with polluted water, she had a sense of awareness underpinning her concern.

“Innovation doesn’t start with a breakthrough but with empathy. It starts with noticing a problem and asking: What if,” as Rao put it, in her speech at the Hawking-Starmus awards.

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Her next big what-if reared its head in the pandemic.

Locked in at home, she began to notice how others her age were struggling. More young people were spending more time online, and behind the relative anonymity of screens and online groups, viciousness was emerging. Did those behind it even realise what they were wreaking? Amid the strife, Rao wondered: Could science help spread kindness?

Following that train of thought, she created Kindly in 2021, a machine-learning-based solution that acts as a sort of language-check (“like spellcheck, but for content”) and flags toxic messages in online groups. Kindly is currently available as an extension for Chrome, Slack, Discord and Google Classroom.

The program was launched in collaboration with Unicef (the United Nations Children’s Fund), as part of its effort to promote what it calls Digital Public Goods for children’s well-being.

Meanwhile, since 2020, she has been conducting her weekly workshops with school students on innovation. Her longest-running such effort reaches Sudanese and Ethiopian children at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, and dates to 2020.

At Kakuma, in addition to encouraging the children to see a greater role for themselves in the world, Rao has helped raise funds for better school supplies and broadband, and for a maker space where children now tinker with tools and technology.

“One of the students at Kakuma has built an app that encourages others to dispose of trash properly by offering rewards such as pencils, pens or small toys in return,” Rao says.

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Her work with people from the margins is about a shift in the balance of power, Rao says.

“I am a South Asian woman. Young, Indian, and female, I look the exact opposite of, say, Albert Einstein. People like me have consistently been silenced. This is why I see science communication as a responsibility.”

It also concerns her, she adds, that change for the better only seems to occur in times of desperation.

“Why weren’t we using Zoom before the pandemic, the way we use it now?” she says. “We need to keep changing how we educate, how we administer medicine, how we reach out to those on the fringes. I’ve never met a student who says they didn’t want to change the world.” We need to teach these students how to think long-term, she adds, and what to do when it feels like it’s time to give up.