🇺🇸 Evann Sun

The project

The Society for Science describes the work as collaboration on text-to-speech translation glasses, providing access to reading material for visually impaired students. The same glasses earned a second award at the same ceremony: Akhil Nagori, 15, also of Santa Clara, took the $10,000 Broadcom Coding with Commitment Award for the inexpensive design that translates text to speech.

One project, two named awards, two students. The competition's prizes are given against different criteria rather than in rank order, which is how a single piece of work can be honoured twice — once for the invention, once for the coding behind it.

Why an invention award

The Lemelson Foundation Award for Invention is given for the act of making something, which is a different test from asking whether a hypothesis was well examined. A finalist has to produce an object that works and can be shown to work.

Assistive devices sit naturally in that category because the standard is practical. Either a visually impaired student can be handed the glasses and hear what is printed in front of them, or the project has not done what it claims. The award citation names the purpose — access to reading material — rather than a technical specification.

Prototyping such a device means choosing a camera, getting readable images of a page held at an awkward angle, running character recognition on limited hardware, and producing speech quickly enough that a reader does not lose the thread. Each of those steps is solvable; making them work together on inexpensive parts is the engineering.

The competition

The Junior Innovators Challenge is the national middle-school science competition run by Society for Science. Thirty finalists were chosen from nearly 2,000 applicants representing 48 states along with American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and Puerto Rico. The programme reaches roughly 60,000 middle-school students.

The $25,000 top award, the Thermo Fisher Scientific ASCEND Award, went to Miles Wu, 14, of New York City, whose study of 54 variations of the Miura-ori origami fold produced disaster-shelter designs that supported more than 9,000 times their own weight. Maya Ajmera, president of Society for Science, said Wu demonstrated "the type of talent Society for Science is proud to support."

Every finalist arrives through the same route: a project entered at an affiliated middle-school science fair, then a national application reviewed against the rest of the country's. Thirty places from nearly two thousand applications is a rate of about one and a half per cent.

The rest of the 2025 awards

Peter Fernández Dulay, 15, of Jacksonville, Florida, took the $10,000 DoD STEM Talent Award for analysing bias in AI image generation, having found that the tools tested perpetuated male stereotypes in depictions of scientists.

Camila Isabel Gonzalez-Thompson, 14, of Ponce, Puerto Rico, took the $10,000 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Award for Health Advancement for examining dengue virus antibodies in Puerto Rican blood samples to establish endemic status and guide public health work.

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: the award, its value, the age and home city given by the organisers, the nature of the glasses, the collaboration with Akhil Nagori, and the date and place of the ceremony.

Open: everything technical — components, cost, accuracy, testing with users — and everything since. The announcement does not state Evann Sun's gender, school or family, and none of those is assumed on this page. Evann Sun is a minor, and only what the organisers published is repeated here.