🇺🇸 Tyler Malkin

The test

The Society for Science describes the project as a saliva test for monitoring iodine deficiency levels without medical intervention. The last phrase is the design brief: a measurement a person can take themselves, outside a clinic and without a blood draw.

Saliva is an attractive sample for exactly that reason. It requires no needle, no trained collector and no sharps disposal, which changes where a test can be used — a school, a village health post, a household — rather than only what it measures.

The distinction between screening and diagnosis matters for a project like this. A test designed for monitoring is meant to flag a trend or a population problem rather than to deliver a verdict on one person, and the standard it has to meet is correspondingly different from a clinical assay.

Why iodine

Iodine is a trace requirement with outsized consequences, because the thyroid needs it to make the hormones that govern growth and development. The remedy has been known for a century and costs almost nothing: iodised salt.

That is what makes monitoring the live question rather than treatment. Deficiency reappears where supplementation lapses, and the populations affected are typically the ones furthest from laboratories. A cheap self-administered test addresses the measurement gap rather than the medical one.

Monitoring is also what makes public-health programmes work or fail. Salt iodisation is a policy that has to be checked continuously across supply chains, and the cost of that checking is the reason coverage slips in some regions. Cheaper measurement therefore has a direct effect on how well a known remedy actually performs.

The award and the competition

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Award for Health Advancement carries $10,000 and is one of the named prizes at the Junior Innovators Challenge, the national middle-school science competition run by Society for Science.

Thirty finalists were chosen from nearly 2,000 applicants across 48 states and American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. The programme reaches around 65,000 middle-school students each year, and $100,000 in prizes was distributed in 2024.

The named awards at the challenge each represent a different funder and a different criterion — invention, coding, defence-relevant science, health advancement — which is why several $10,000 prizes sit alongside the single $25,000 top award rather than beneath it in a ranking.

The rest of the 2024 field

The top prize, the $25,000 Thermo Fisher Scientific ASCEND Award, went to Tina Jin, 13, of San Jose, California, for a water filter made from animal bone whose output was confirmed to potable standards by the San Jose Water Company.

Other $10,000 awards went to Samvith Mahadevan of Austin, Texas, for a machine-learning allergen detector, Gary Allen Montelongo of La Joya, Texas, for train suspension modelling, and Sophie Tong of Palo Alto, California, for algorithms improving vehicle vision in darkness and fog.

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: the award, its value, his age, his home town, the nature of the test and the date and place of the ceremony, all from the organiser's announcement.

Open: the chemistry, the accuracy, the cost, any validation against laboratory measurement, and whether the test has been developed further. Tyler Malkin is a child, and this page repeats only what was published. Nothing here should be read as a claim that the test is clinically validated or available.