🇺🇸 Roy Kim

Atmospheric water generation is an established engineering category with an unforgiving economics problem. Condensing water from air requires either refrigeration below the dew point or a sorbent material that captures vapour and then gives it up under heat or reduced pressure. Both consume energy roughly in proportion to how dry the air is — which means the technique is least efficient exactly where water is scarcest. That trade-off is the central design constraint of any device in this class, and it is why the interesting work is in materials and cycle design rather than in the basic principle.

Roy's stated motive for entering the competition was distribution, not validation. "I entered the 3M Young Scientist Challenge because I wanted to showcase my invention to people around the world," he wrote in his finalist profile. "If more people are aware of this problem and the potential solution, the problem might be able to de-escalate." It is a compact argument that awareness of the constraint is itself part of the fix.

That view of technology as a connective force runs through his answers. Asked to name a favourite invention of the last hundred years, he chose the internet — "because it has had so much impact on the world. It lets us connect with people all around the globe, and provides every piece of knowledge humans need." His example was pointedly human rather than technical: "Because of the internet, connections between people aren't lost — for example, people staying in the hospital are still able to connect with people around the world."

The 2026 3M Young Scientist Challenge, in its nineteenth year, invited fifth through eighth graders across the United States to identify an everyday problem and pitch a solution in a one-to-two-minute video, judged by 3M scientists and education leaders on creativity, scientific knowledge and communication effectiveness. This year's finalist projects aligned with two of 3M's forty-nine technology platforms — Climate Tech and Safety. A water-from-air chamber for agriculture belongs to the first, and to one of its most acute sub-problems: drought-driven agricultural failure is a first-order driver of food insecurity and displacement.

His assigned 3M mentor is Rodrigo Marmol, a Global Portfolio Manager who oversees the strategy and development of the company's conductive pressure-sensitive adhesive portfolio worldwide. A portfolio manager brings the question a young inventor rarely asks unprompted — not whether the device works, but at what cost, at what scale, and against which alternative a farmer would actually choose it.

His ambition is stated with characteristic economy: "A successful engineer that works on solving rising problems across the globe, specializing in the environmental field." So is his chosen motto — "Do what you can do tomorrow, today." On 12–13 October 2026 the ten finalists gather at the 3M Innovation Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, for live challenges and a final presentation to a panel of judges. One will leave with $25,000 and the title of America's Top Young Scientist.