🇺🇸 Aakash Manaswi

Aakash Manaswi attends Lake Highland Preparatory School in Orlando. The project that carried him to Phoenix — "Capturable Carbon Dioxide To Save Our Bees" — also won the Animal Sciences category at ISEF 2026, sponsored by Jane Street. He calls the device the Mite Blower.

Its logic is simple enough to explain in a sentence, which is part of why it won a communication award: carbon dioxide can be used to kill varroa mites inside a hive without introducing a pesticide, which means no chemical residue in the honey and no selection pressure driving resistance in the mite population.

The evidence behind it is field evidence rather than laboratory evidence. Across a ten-week trial covering sixty hives, the colonies treated with carbon dioxide were healthier and produced more honey than the hives treated with conventional pesticides. Sixty hives over ten weeks is a serious amount of fieldwork for a high-school project; it is also the only kind of test a beekeeper would accept.

The idea began roughly five years earlier, when he visited a beekeeper's apiary and found half the hives empty. The explanation he was given — varroa — is the same one given to commercial operators across North America every winter.

The Peggy Scripps award is not for the science alone; it is for the ability to explain it. That distinction fits the shape of his year. Spectrum News 13 reported in January 2026 that he had been a top-ten finalist in the 3M Young Scientist Challenge the previous year, an experience that paired him with a scientist mentor to build a prototype, and that he had presented his beekeeping work at the COP30 United Nations climate conference in Brazil, attending alongside his older brother, who presented related research.

Varroa destructor is the most damaging parasite in commercial beekeeping. It reproduces inside the sealed brood cell, feeds on developing bees, and spreads viruses through the colony; untreated hives usually collapse within a season or two. The conventional response is a rotation of chemical miticides, and the mite has developed resistance to several of them, which leaves beekeepers cycling between compounds while residues accumulate in wax that is reused year after year.

The Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair is the largest pre-college science competition in the world, drawing roughly seventeen hundred finalists each year from affiliated fairs in more than sixty countries. Category awards are judged by working scientists, which is why an ISEF result is treated as a genuine research credential rather than a school prize, and why the fair's alumni list includes Nobel laureates and National Medal of Science recipients.

His own framing of it, given to Spectrum News, is the least sentimental line in his coverage: that he is a young person with ideas as good as anyone else's. Judged on the trial design, that is a defensible claim rather than a slogan.