🇺🇸 Ahmed Abdelsalam

VERDA — the name he gave the system — is described in his competition materials as an innovative technology that harvests energy from movement such as walking, wind and waves in order to support more sustainable power solutions. The category is called kinetic or ambient energy harvesting, and the physics is unforgiving: the available power density from human footfall or gentle air movement is small, so the engineering problem is not whether energy can be captured but whether it can be captured efficiently enough, cheaply enough and durably enough to be worth installing. Designs that borrow from natural structures — the way a leaf flutters, the way a stem bends and recovers — are a live research direction precisely because evolution has already optimised for extracting work from irregular, low-grade motion.

His reason for entering was not modest. "I really enjoy coming up with ideas and using science to solve problems," he wrote. "I wanted to share my project and show that even a student can create an invention that could help people and the environment. Since my project focuses on clean energy, this challenge felt like the right place to share it. I also wanted to push myself, learn from the experience, and grow as a young scientist. For me, this competition is not just about winning, but also about believing that my ideas can make a difference."

The 2026 challenge asked students in fifth through eighth grade to spot an everyday problem, develop a solution, and pitch it in a one-to-two-minute video. Entries were required to align with 3M's technology platforms, and this year's finalist projects clustered around two of them: Climate Tech and Safety. VERDA sits squarely in the first. Judges — 3M scientists and education leaders from across the country — scored on creativity, scientific knowledge and communication effectiveness, three criteria that between them reward a student who understands the physics and can also explain why anyone should care.

Asked to name a favourite scientific achievement of the last hundred years, Ahmed chose one with a personal resonance: the femtochemistry of Ahmed Zewail, the Egyptian-American chemist who won the 1999 Nobel Prize for using ultrafast laser pulses to observe chemical reactions as they happen. "I like it because he helped create new ways to study chemical reactions at a super fast speed," he wrote. "This matters because it helped scientists understand chemistry better and opened the door for more discoveries. I also like it because Ahmed Zewail is a scientist I really admire, and his success inspires me to work hard in science too." The quotation he chose to represent himself is Zewail's own: "The important thing is to never stop questioning."

Through the summer of 2026 he works with a 3M mentor assigned to him — Abhishek Srivastava, an Advanced Research Specialist who develops engineering solutions by combining mechanics, materials science and computational modelling across a range of industries. It is an apt pairing for a device that lives at the intersection of all three: the mechanics of capturing irregular motion, the materials that must flex millions of times without failing, and the modelling required to predict output before anything is built.

His stated ambition is unusually concrete for a twelve-year-old. "In 15 years, I hope to be an inventor or engineer because I really enjoy coming up with ideas and testing how things work," he wrote. "I want to make inventions that help people and protect the environment, especially by creating new clean energy technology. I hope I will still be curious, creative, and not afraid to try new things, because that is how big ideas can grow into something real." On 12–13 October 2026 he will present VERDA at the 3M Innovation Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, where one of the ten finalists will be named America's Top Young Scientist and receive $25,000.