🇺🇸 Naboshree Santra

The physics she is exploiting is the same as that of the shade balls floated on drinking-water reservoirs during drought: cover the surface, block direct sunlight, cut the vapour-pressure gradient, and the rate of loss falls. Applying it to soil rather than open water changes the requirements substantially, because a soil cover must let rain and irrigation through, must not suffocate the crop, and must eventually disappear without leaving residue. That last constraint is the one plastic mulch fails, and it is the constraint her design is organised around.

Her stated reason for entering was to find out where her design was weak. "As I've been developing my project on addressing drought, I've realized there is still a lot to refine and improve," she wrote in her finalist profile. "I entered the 3M Young Scientist Challenge because I want to better understand how my biodegradable mulch could be developed into something more useful for the real world."

She was specific about the kind of criticism she wanted. "I'm especially looking forward to mentorship and feedback from professionals, since that could help me see gaps in my approach and improve how the material performs for people actually affected by droughts," she wrote. "I love learning and including new perspectives that I might not think of on my own." She added that she was equally keen to learn from the other nine finalists — "and see how their ideas might connect with or even improve my project, and how mine might do the same for theirs."

Her favourite invention of the last hundred years is the Rubik's Cube, and her reasoning is a decomposition strategy dressed as a preference. "It's a reminder that even the most overwhelming chaos can be brought into order with logic," she wrote. "Aside from the satisfying click of the tiles, the cube is a lesson in patience. Whether I'm solving a classic 3x3 or a complex Megaminx, it's taught me that impossible problems are usually just a series of smaller, solvable steps waiting for the right algorithm."

Her assigned 3M mentor is Ann Gilman, an Advanced Research Specialist in the company's Corporate Research Process Laboratory who brings precision coating and patterning processes from bench scale to production scale. That is, almost exactly, the skill her project needs next: a laboratory formulation that reduces evaporation is not the same object as a material that can be manufactured in the quantity a farm requires, at a price a farm will pay.

The 2026 challenge is in its nineteenth year and drew entries from fifth through eighth graders nationwide, judged on creativity, scientific knowledge and communication effectiveness by a panel of 3M scientists and education leaders. On 12–13 October 2026 the ten finalists gather at the 3M Innovation Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, for live challenges and final presentations; one will receive $25,000 and the title of America's Top Young Scientist. Naboshree's own ambition is compact: "A researcher who turns natural materials into useful and sustainable innovations for a healthier planet." Her chosen motto is shorter still — "If nature can grow it, we can engineer it."