Lillian Kay Petersen: $250,000 Science Talent Search Winner

Biography

What she built

Petersen used vegetation data from MODIS, the imaging instrument carried on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites, which has photographed the entire land surface of the Earth every one to two days since 2000. From the greenness of the crop through the growing season, her method estimates the yield that season will deliver, country by country.

The value of the approach is its timing and its cost. Agricultural statistics in much of Africa arrive after the harvest, from surveys that are expensive and slow. Satellite data arrive continuously and are free. A prediction made mid-season is a prediction that can still change what aid agencies do.

The 2020 prize

The Regeneron Science Talent Search named Petersen its first-place winner for 2020, with a prize of $250,000, the largest single award in American high-school science. She was a senior at Los Alamos High School in New Mexico, a town whose national laboratory gives it an unusually dense population of working physicists.

The Science Talent Search has run since 1942, under Westinghouse, then Intel, then Regeneron sponsorship, and is the oldest science and mathematics competition for American high-school students. Its finalists are chosen from around 2,000 entrants a year and judged in Washington on original research.

Why crop forecasting is hard

Predicting a harvest from space means separating the signal of a maize field from cloud, dust, other vegetation and the ordinary variation of soil. It also means calibrating against ground truth that, for many African countries, is patchy. A model that works in Iowa, where decades of clean yield statistics exist, does not transfer without work.

Building a method that runs across many countries, rather than one well-documented region, is the part of the project that takes it beyond a school exercise. The competition judges original research and the entrant's command of it under questioning; scale and defensibility are what they reward.

What is documented, and what is not

Documented: first place and the $250,000 award in 2020, the age of 17, Los Alamos High School, and the subject of the work - real-time crop yield prediction across Africa using satellite vegetation data.

Not documented in the sources used here: the precise countries and crops covered, the accuracy figures the model achieved, whether any agency adopted it, and where Petersen went on to study. Her first-place listing is recorded by the Society for Science and in the compiled winners list for the competition; neither reproduces the research.

What the win is worth beyond the money

The Science Talent Search prize is deliberately structured as an investment rather than a reward: $250,000 covers the cost of an American undergraduate education outright, which is why the competition has been called, for eight decades, the country's most consequential school science contest.

The alumni record is the other half of the argument. Former winners and finalists include Nobel laureates and National Medal of Science recipients, and the contest treats a placement as the opening of a career. For Petersen, no later chapter appears in the sources gathered here, and this page leaves that space empty rather than filling it.

Achievement Timeline

Lillian Kay Petersen — every milestone on this page, in order.

2020

Named a finalist in the Regeneron ScieNamed a finalist in the Regeneron Science Talent Search as a senior at Los Alamos High School

2020

Wins first place and $250,000 at 17 foWins first place and $250,000 at 17 for real-time crop yield prediction across Africa

2020

Her method, built on MODIS satellite vHer method, built on MODIS satellite vegetation data, is recorded in the competition's finalist listing

Historical Comparison

Person	Country	Milestone	Age / Stat
Li-sa-X	Japan	Viral shred guitar covers from the age of eight	Age 0
Olly Pearson	United Kingdom	Fourth place in the Britain's Got Talent 2025 final	Age 0
Calysta Bevier	United States	Winning Simon Cowell's Golden Buzzer on America's Got Talent at 16 (2016)	Age 16
Lillian Kay Petersen	United States	First place, Regeneron Science Talent Search 2020	Age 17
Ayla Tesler-Mabé	Canada	Viral guitar covers; Fender endorsee	—

What is documented — and what is not

✓ Documented

She won first place and $250,000 at the 2020 Regeneron Science Talent Search at 17
Her project predicted crop yields across Africa from satellite vegetation data
She attended Los Alamos High School, New Mexico

? Unverified, disputed or wrong

The accuracy of the model and the countries and crops it covered
Whether any agency or government adopted the method
Where she went to university and what she works on now
Any detail of her family or how the project began

Questions people ask about Lillian Kay Petersen

How old is Lillian Kay Petersen?

She was 17 when she won in March 2020; her birth year is recorded as 2003. No exact date of birth appears in these sources.

What did Lillian Petersen win?

First place and $250,000 at the 2020 Regeneron Science Talent Search, the top award in the oldest American high-school science competition.

What was her project?

A system that predicts crop yields across Africa in real time from satellite vegetation data, using imagery from the MODIS instrument.

Where is she from?

Los Alamos, New Mexico, where she attended Los Alamos High School.

Where is Lillian Petersen now?

No source used here records her university or current work. Nothing after the 2020 award is documented on this page.

Is Lillian Petersen on Wikipedia?

She has no article of her own in the sources used here, but her name appears in the winners list in Wikipedia's article on the Regeneron Science Talent Search.