🇺🇸Siyaa R.
Poddar

May 2025, Los Angeles Convention Center. The 75th Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair — the world's most prestigious pre-college science competition — is announcing its top honours. Forty thousand dollars, fifty thousand, sixty — and then the number that stops the room: seventy-five thousand dollars, awarded to the Regeneron Young Scientist Award winner. The recipient is Siyaa R. Poddar, sixteen years old, from Chandler, Arizona. Her project: a device that costs ninety-three cents to build, takes fifteen minutes to use, requires no equipment to read, and can detect invisible toxic dust that has been quietly killing people for decades. The crowd applauds. Poddar stands at the podium and thinks, as she later says, about the people the device might one day protect.

The problem Siyaa set out to solve begins in the American Southwest — a landscape of extraordinary beauty that conceals an invisible public health emergency. Across Arizona, New Mexico, and neighbouring states, hundreds of abandoned mines dot the desert landscape. Decades of mining for uranium, silver, and coal have left behind toxic residues: fine silica dust and uranium particles that, when disturbed by wind or human activity, become airborne. These particles are small enough to enter the deepest chambers of human lungs, and they accumulate. Over years and decades, they cause silicosis — a progressive, irreversible lung disease — and have been linked to autoimmune conditions including Sjögren's syndrome. On Indigenous reservations in the Southwest, rates of Sjögren's syndrome run dramatically higher than in the general population. The mines near those communities have never been adequately cleaned up. The people who live near them have had no affordable way to know when the air they breathe has become dangerous.

Siyaa's solution was to build what she called RADAR — a colorimetric detection system that traps reactive chemicals in a metal-organic framework, a cage of metal atoms and organic molecules that stabilizes the chemistry while allowing contact with the environment. When silica or uranium dust reaches the framework, it triggers a colour change visible to the naked eye. No laboratory. No expensive spectrometer. No technical training required. Just look at the colour and know whether you are safe. The device costs ninety-three cents to manufacture and takes fifteen minutes to deliver a result. It is the kind of elegant simplicity that marks genuine scientific genius: the most powerful solutions are often the cheapest and the most accessible.

The science is sophisticated even if the final product looks simple. Metal-organic frameworks — MOFs — are a relatively new class of materials that have attracted intense interest in materials science for their ability to selectively trap, sense, and react to specific molecules. Designing a MOF that reacts to silica dust in one framework and uranium particles in another, that retains its sensitivity under real-world conditions including heat, humidity, and particulate exposure, required significant chemistry knowledge and experimental rigour. Siyaa achieved this at sixteen, at a high school in Chandler, Arizona, working on a problem she had identified herself after learning about the Southwest's abandoned mine crisis.

Her scientific work alone would make her extraordinary. But Poddar's ambitions extend beyond the laboratory. She is president of her high school chapter of She's the First, an organization that supports first-generation college-going girls — guiding over a hundred girls in developing their potential. She co-leads Water the Roots, a youth sustainability initiative that has engaged students across Arizona. She is a Youth Civic Impact Fellow. In 2024, she spoke at TEDxGateway in what appears to be an early iteration of the scientific and advocacy work that would later earn her national recognition. BBC Tech Life featured her story after her ISEF win, bringing international attention to both the device and the communities it was designed to protect. She is sixteen and already building the life of someone twice her age.

In a competition that attracts thousands of the world's most talented young scientists — from over 70 countries, representing the best of pre-college science education globally — winning the Regeneron Young Scientist Award means standing at the very top. Past winners have gone on to Nobel Prizes, medical breakthroughs, and careers that reshaped their fields. Siyaa Poddar at sixteen is already asking the questions that will define her scientific future: not how to advance the frontier of knowledge for its own sake, but how to put knowledge in the hands of people who need it most. Her ninety-three-cent detector is not just a science fair project. It is a proof of concept for what a sixteen-year-old can do when she decides the world needs something and sets about building it.