🇺🇸 Meghana Bollimpalli

The award

The Society for Science lists Bollimpalli among the 2018 top winners with a $50,000 Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award, one of two given beneath the fair's $75,000 first prize.

Her project title is published in full: 'Green Synthesis of Phosphorous, Nitrogen Co-Doped Carbon Materials from Renewable Resources for Supercapacitor Applications via Microwave Assisted Technique'. No abstract accompanies it, so the title is the whole of the technical record here.

What the title says, term by term

A supercapacitor stores energy electrostatically at the surface of its electrodes rather than through the chemical reactions a battery uses, which lets it charge and discharge very quickly. Electrode surface area is therefore what governs its capacity, and porous carbon is the standard material.

Doping means introducing other elements — here phosphorus and nitrogen together — into the carbon structure to change its electrical behaviour. 'Green synthesis from renewable resources' describes where the carbon came from and how it was made, and 'microwave assisted' names the heating method. The source reports no measurements, so this page states no performance figures.

Read together, the title describes a materials project with a manufacturing argument attached: not only a doped carbon that might perform well, but one whose feedstock is renewable and whose preparation is quick. Whether the resulting electrodes matched conventional ones is exactly what the published record does not say.

The 2018 fair

Intel ISEF 2018 ran from 13 to 18 May at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, with nearly 1,800 young scientists drawn from 420 affiliated fairs across more than 78 countries, regions and territories.

Approximately 600 finalists received awards, including 22 Best of Category winners at $5,000 each, with $1,000 grants to their schools and affiliated fairs.

The rest of the 2018 podium

The Gordon E. Moore Award of $75,000 went to Oliver Nicholls, 19, of Sydney, for an autonomous window cleaning robot for commercial high-rise buildings.

The second $50,000 award went to Dhruvik Parikh, 18, of Bothell, Washington, for a sol-gel derived composite membrane for the vanadium redox flow battery. Two of the three top 2018 projects were energy-storage materials, approached from different directions.

What is documented — and what is not

The listing gives her name, age, home city, the award, its value and the project title. It names no school, no mentor and no laboratory, and publishes no data.

It also stops at the fair. No source used here reports her later studies or work, or whether the synthesis work was published or continued. Her birth year is inferred from being 17 in May 2018 and is approximate.

The firm fact is the ranking. Nearly 1,800 finalists reached Pittsburgh that week, each having already won a qualifying fair, and a panel of doctorate-level judges placed her entry among the three best of them.

Why cheap electrode carbon matters

Supercapacitors are already used where power has to be delivered or absorbed quickly — regenerative braking, power smoothing, backup supplies — and the cost of their electrode material is a real constraint on where they can be deployed.

Deriving that carbon from renewable feedstock, with microwave heating rather than prolonged high-temperature processing, addresses both cost and energy input. That is the general significance of the approach named in her title; the specific results remain undocumented in the source used here.