🇺🇸 Lakshmi Agrawal

Lakshmi Agrawal, a student at Interlake High School in Bellevue, Washington, entered the 2025 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair — known as Regeneron ISEF — among nearly 1,700 young finalists drawn from around the world. The fair, run by the Society for Science, is the most prestigious global competition for high-school researchers, and its top awards are among the most coveted prizes a teenage scientist can win. Agrawal left it as one of the event's marquee winners.

Her project targeted a pollutant known to environmental scientists as a serious threat to salmon populations — a toxic compound that forms as vehicle tires wear down and is carried into waterways by stormwater runoff. The chemical has been linked to mass die-offs of coho salmon in the Pacific Northwest, making it a pressing regional and ecological problem. Agrawal's insight was to attack it with cheap, abundant, plant-derived material.

She built sponge-like filters from the waste fibers of the jute plant, a fast-growing crop already used to make burlap and rope. In laboratory tests of water dosed with tire particles, according to the Society for Science, her jute-based filters removed up to 80 percent of the target pollutant. The result pairs strong performance with two qualities that matter enormously for real-world adoption: low cost and sustainability, since the raw material is agricultural waste rather than an engineered specialty product.

For that work Agrawal received a $75,000 Regeneron Young Scientist Award — one of two such awards given at ISEF 2025, second in prestige only to the $100,000 top innovator prize. The 2025 fair distributed more than $9 million in awards overall, and Agrawal's recognition placed her at the very top of a global field of teenage researchers.

What distinguishes her project is its translational logic. Many science-fair winners impress with theoretical sophistication; Agrawal's filter is notable for how directly it maps onto a deployable solution. A filtration medium made from crop waste that captures most of a salmon-killing toxin is the kind of idea that agencies, municipalities and conservation groups can imagine scaling — a bridge between the laboratory bench and the riverbank.

Her win also reflects a broader trend at the top of the ISEF podium, where young researchers are increasingly rewarded for tackling concrete environmental and public-health problems with frugal engineering. Alongside 2025 honorees working on cheaper antiviral drug synthesis and recyclable plastics, Agrawal's stormwater filter fit a theme of practical impact.

The specific pollutant she targeted has become a cause célèbre in environmental science precisely because it was hidden for so long. For decades, researchers were baffled by sudden die-offs of coho salmon returning to spawn in urban streams after rainstorms. The culprit was eventually traced to a compound generated as tire rubber degrades — a toxin so potent that it can kill fish at vanishingly small concentrations. Building a cheap way to strip it from stormwater speaks directly to one of the more unsettling recent discoveries in aquatic toxicology.

Her choice of material is as clever as her target. Jute is one of the most widely grown natural fibers on earth, and jute processing leaves behind abundant waste. Turning that waste into a functional filtration medium means the raw input is essentially free and renewable, sidestepping the cost and supply problems that sink many promising lab-scale remedies. It is the kind of frugal, circular design that agencies and conservation groups can actually imagine deploying at a streamside or in a stormwater drain.

Regeneron ISEF itself lends the accomplishment its scale. Formerly known as the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, it gathers roughly 1,700 of the strongest young researchers from scores of countries, each already a winner of regional and national fairs. To place among its very top award winners is to stand at the summit of pre-college science globally — a distinction shared, in Agrawal's year, with peers working on cheaper antiviral drugs and recyclable plastics.

At eighteen, Lakshmi Agrawal has already produced research that addresses a real ecological crisis with a real proposed remedy. Whether or not her jute filters ultimately reach the water, her ISEF Young Scientist Award marks her as one of the most promising environmental engineers of her generation — a teenager who looked at an invisible poison and built something to catch it.