A 12-year-old girl from Miller Middle School in San Jose has won $25,000 in a science fair for her invention of a new fire detection system that’s faster, cheaper, and more reliable than smoke detectors.
The Thermo Fischer Junior Innovator’s Challenge claims to be the nation’s premier STEM contest for middle schoolers, and Shanya Gill won over second and third-place inventions of a smartphone app that can detect certain cancers and an experimental method of generating electricity through plant cells.
In the summer of 2022, a fire destroyed a restaurant behind Shanya’s house. That incident inspired her to create a fire-detection system that involved connecting an affordable thermal camera to a compact computer.