The efforts of one Bengaluru student, Sahithi Pingali, have been recognised in a rather universal way - the 12th standard student of Inventure Academy has had a planet in the Milky Way named after her!
Sahithi had developed an app to collect data on the frothy, polluted lakes of Bengaluru through crowd-sourcing. She entered the app in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) and was one of the 2,000 finalists from around the world.
She came within the top 3 per cent at the ISEF competition - and for that achievement, the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) decided to name a planet after her. MIT has the right to choose the name of minor planets.
Sahithi is right now not in Bengaluru, but is doing an internship at the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department of the University of Michigan. And water pollution is still on her mind. She hopes to learn more about detecting and dealing with water pollution.
