I believe innovation and building solutions is the way to solve the problems of climate change.”
Varun Saikia
Vadodara, India
Global Rise Winner, 2021
When Varun Saikia was 12 years old, he read an article about a whale that died from consuming plastic waste. After some research, he discovered the devastating impact of garbage patches in the world’s oceans. That inspired him to take action.
“I thought, this is bigger than any problem that I have ever seen,” says Saikia, now 17 years old.
Saikia spent the next four years developing a low-cost, AI-driven vessel that cleans plastic waste from bodies of water. Made of recycled plastic bottles, the 10-foot-long, battery-powered prototype could be remotely controlled to swallow about 11 pounds of trash at one time. But Saikia knew he could make it even better.
His latest iteration, called FLIPPER, is a 25-foot-long vessel that can collect about 1,100 pounds of floating waste. As it cleans, it also gathers live data about the types of material it collects through image recognition and waste analysis technology. Saikia is working to enhance that data collection and automate FLIPPER, which he hopes can begin actively cleaning oceans some time in 2023.
With permission from 67 municipal governments across Asia to test in their waters—some even expressing interest in becoming future customers—Saikia hopes FLIPPER will eventually clean the notoriously polluted Ganges River as well as parts of the Indian Ocean. He has also launched an initiative to rally support for ocean clean-up that so far includes more than 250 participants across the world.
“Plastic in the ocean is definitely not supposed to be there,” Saikia says. “Different species die. They are getting endangered. Humans are also facing the effects of plastics in the ocean…[a solution] is needed.”
How Varun Saikia Wants To Forge A Better World:
Remove harmful plastic from the world’s oceans
Explore ways to generate
renewable energy from the
ocean’s resources
Rally support for and awareness of the global fight against climate change
Valentina Barrón García
Querétaro, Mexico
Global Rise Winner, 2021
As I grew up, I realized that sustainability must be in every flourishing and healthy community.”
Valentina Barrón García feels fortunate that her family was able to harvest some of their own food while she was growing up in central Mexico. She realized that access to land and the resources necessary to grow sustainable food crops is a luxury not everyone can afford.
“That experience of growing my own crops since I was little…led to my interest in making sustainable living strategies for people that don’t have access to it,” she says.
For her Rise project, Barrón García designed and prototyped a solar-powered hydroponic system made of low-cost, recyclable materials. It utilizes rainwater through a pump and compost fertilizer to grow pesticide-free fruit and vegetables. Barrón García believes her creation could offer almost anyone their own affordable and renewable food source.
In particular, she hopes that it can help to provide sustainable nutrition to food-insecure communities and the most vulnerable groups among them, like seniors who may find it difficult to buy their own groceries.
“They have a lot of dependency on their relatives,” she says. “So they may lack adequate nutrition because they are unable to go buy food, [especially] if they live in rural areas.”
Now a university student, 19-year-old Barrón García is marrying her interest in addressing food insecurity with a love of drawing by studying sustainable architecture. She hopes that through her studies as well as collaboration with other Rise Global Winners, she can advance worldwide awareness and availability of sustainable living practices.
“We’ve created a network all over the world,” she says of her fellow Rise winners working in the same field. “I've never met a more inspiring group of people.”
Increase access to sustainable food and water systems
Spread awareness about nutrition and renewable food sources
Empower food-insecure communities with independent food growth options
How Valentina Barrón García Wants To Forge A Better World
Safiya Sankari
Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.
Global Rise Winner, 2022
We need better disease diagnosis methods for a better medical future.”
During an internship at a nanotechnology lab, Safiya Sankari discovered that a major challenge to disease detection is how long it takes to manually collect and analyze patient samples. So the Syrian-American scientist, programmer and current student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology experimented with using the programming language Python to make the process faster—and simpler.
“I’m very concerned with making medical care more accessible and affordable,” the 17-year-old says. “Better disease detection methods have the potential to save millions of lives.”
Sankari saw an answer in existing breath analysis technology. For her Rise project, she developed an algorithm that reads breath profiles associated with certain types of diseases via an electronic handheld sensing device, or “e-nose”—typically used to detect odors or flavors for quality control and other applications in labs.
In addition to creating a practical application for e-nose technology, Sankari’s code shortens the time required to analyze e-nose data and ensures more accurate results. Sankari hopes her work will offer more accessible and easy-to-use disease prevention in healthcare.
“Having a system such as an e-nose, which can easily detect disease biosignatures from breath in minutes, can greatly improve the survival rate from many different diseases,” she says.
Sankari says the support of the Rise program in her work has been invaluable—and she plans to continue taking full advantage of the program’s opportunities to further her research and develop more ideas to help humanity.
“I plan to work further in the area of disease detection,” she says. “On a broader scale, I hope to find ways to merge technology and medicine to allow for a more innovative and equitable approach to healthcare.
Save lives with faster, simpler disease detection methods
Give medical professionals better diagnostic tools
Improve worldwide access to preventative healthcare
How Safiya Sankari Wants To Forge A Better World
Applications are now open! Click to learn more about Rise
(Left) Safiya Sankari presents her Rise project at an American Chemical Society conference in Chicago.
(Right) An “e-nose” device uses chemical sensors to analyze breath with Sankari’s unique algorithm.
Varun Saikia experiments with FLIPPER, an
AI-driven vessel he invented to remove plastic
waste from oceans.
(Right) Valentina Barrón García attends the 2022 Rise Residential Summit in Cape Town, South Africa.
(Left) Lettuce grows from a prototype of Barrón García’s hydroponic food-growing system.
