🇺🇸 Anusha Arora

Anusha Arora is a student at Interlake High School in Bellevue, Washington, a Seattle-area suburb that in 2026 produced two of the fair's biggest winners — GeekWire reported on the 'Bellevue teens targeting salmon die-offs and mental health' who won big at the international fair, pairing Anusha with $75,000 winner Lakshmi Agrawal. Like every ISEF finalist, Anusha earned her place in Phoenix by winning a top prize at an affiliated regional fair, the pipeline through which millions of students worldwide are funneled toward roughly 1,700 finalist slots.

Her project attacked a structural problem in mental-health care. Music therapy is a recognized approach for supporting mental health, but access is limited: cost, provider shortages and lack of insurance coverage make it inaccessible to many of the people who need it most. Anusha's response was HARMONI — in full, 'Harmonically Adaptive Real-Time Multimodal Output for Neural Integration, an AI-Powered Music Therapy Platform for Global Mental Health' — a portable device rather than a clinic-bound service.

Technically, HARMONI delivers tailored, adaptive music based on input from finger sensors. The platform combines eleven AI programs that detect the user's emotional state and generate music in real time in response — a closed loop between physiology and composition. Across several experiments, people using the device showed reductions in stress and anxiety, and users also stayed more engaged with their therapy sessions than they otherwise would, according to the Society for Science's award citation.

At Regeneron ISEF 2026, held May 9–15 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Arizona, that work earned her two distinct honors. In the Grand Awards, she took first place in the Technology Enhances the Arts category — sponsored, fittingly, by Midjourney — a category First Award carrying $6,000. Category winners form the pool from which the fair's top prizes are drawn.

From that pool, judges gave Anusha the F. Thomson Leighton and Bonnie Berger Family Prize for STEM Excellence, worth $50,000 — one of only a handful of top honors at the 2026 fair, alongside the $100,000 George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award won by Japan's Hikaru Kuribayashi and the $50,000 Gordon E. Moore Award won by Canada's Evan Budz. The Society for Science recorded the moment in a winner's interview published on its YouTube channel.

The scale of the stage matters: Regeneron ISEF is the world's largest pre-college STEM competition, distributing more than $7 million in awards in 2026, with Regeneron's support for the Society's competitions totaling more than $300 million from 2017 to 2036. Society president Maya Ajmera said of the 2026 winners that they are taking on urgent challenges 'with rigor, imagination, and determination.' At 15, Anusha was among the youngest of the fair's top-prize winners, and her platform points at a concrete future — making music therapy for stress, anxiety and depression accessible to people no clinic currently reaches.