🇺🇸 Tina Jin

The filter

The project is a water filtration system that uses animal bone as its filtering material. What lifts it above a demonstration is the verification: the Society for Science reported that third-party testing by the San Jose Water Company confirmed the output met potable water standards.

That is an unusual line to find attached to a middle-school project. Most student filters are assessed on turbidity or on a single contaminant; an external utility signing off on drinking-water standards is a different order of evidence, and it is the detail that the organisers led with.

Testing is also where most student water projects stop short. Confirming that an output is safe to drink means checking for bacteria, metals and chemistry against a published standard, using instruments a school does not own — which is why an external utility's involvement is the detail that turns a prototype into a result.

Why she built it

The stated motivation was a statistic: Jin began the work after learning that one in three people worldwide lack access to clean water. The design follows from that framing. A filter intended for places without water infrastructure has to be made from something locally available, and animal bone qualifies almost everywhere.

Bone char has a long history in water and sugar treatment for precisely that reason — it is cheap, it is a by-product of food production, and it can be produced without industrial equipment. Reaching potable standards with it is the hard part, and that is what the utility's test addressed.

The award

Jin received the Thermo Fisher Scientific ASCEND Award — Aspiring Scientists Cultivating Exciting New Discoveries — worth $25,000, the top prize at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge. The ceremony was held in Washington, D.C. on 29 October 2024.

Maya Ajmera, president and chief executive of Society for Science, said: "Tina's scientific ingenuity coupled with her exceptional leadership, collaboration and critical thinking skills illustrate what we are looking for in the Thermo Fisher JIC." The competition assesses teamwork and communication alongside the project itself.

The competition

The Junior Innovators Challenge is the national middle-school competition run by Society for Science. Thirty finalists were selected from nearly 2,000 applicants, drawn from 48 states along with American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. The programme reaches around 65,000 middle-school students each year, and $100,000 in prizes was awarded in 2024.

Alongside Jin, $10,000 awards went to Gary Allen Montelongo of La Joya, Texas, for train suspension modelling, Sophie Tong of Palo Alto for vehicle-vision algorithms in fog and darkness, Samvith Mahadevan of Austin for a machine-learning allergen detector, and Tyler Malkin of Greenwich, Connecticut, for a saliva test for iodine deficiency.

The competition is aimed at students in the middle-school years, which puts it several years earlier than the science fairs that attract most attention. Finalists are typically 13 or 14, and the projects are assessed on teamwork and problem-solving exercises as well as on the research each student brings.

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: the award, the amount, her age, her home city, the use of animal bone, the third-party testing by San Jose Water Company and its result, and the date and place of the ceremony.

Open: the design of the filter, its flow rate, cost, lifespan and which contaminants it removes; whether it has been deployed anywhere; and anything about her since October 2024. Tina Jin is a child, and this page carries only what the organisers and the press published.