Young Scientist Challenge
Table of Contents
The Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge is a national youth science competition. For me, it was one of the best experiences of my life. I entered by making a video about wind power and ended up going to New York City, meeting nine other kids like me, and having the time of my life learning about science and doing experiments with the others.
For the final round of the competition, I created a wound closure device designed to help deep cuts heal more quickly. Here I am demonstrating the device on a sponge model of a wound wrapped around a water bottle "arm":
Demonstrating my wound closure device
Somehow, I ended up winning! I was named "America's Top Young Scientist" — an absurd exaggeration but one that sounds pretty cool. 🙂
Accepting the award in New York City
2010
Speech to 2025 Finalists
In 2025, I was invited back to co-host the challenge. This was such an honor and a pleasure! It happened to be 15 years after I'd participated in the Young Scientist Challenge myself — when I was 15 years old — so it split my life in two.
At the awards ceremony, I gave a speech to the finalists:
In 1910, a famous scientist wrote: "Certain bodies... become luminous when heated. Their luminosity disappears after some time, but the capacity of becoming luminous afresh through heat is restored to them by the action of a spark, and by the action of radium."
Marie Curie was talking about physical substances, but she could have just as well been talking about people. Certain people — like all of you — become luminous when inspired. Your luminosity could disappear after some age, but your capacity of becoming luminous afresh through inspiration is restored to you by the action of a spark.
Let this contest be your spark, as it has been mine, and never let your luminosity dim.
Marie Curie later wrote: “All my life through, the new sights of nature made me rejoice like a child.” In this moment, when each of you is moving from youth towards adulthood, let joyous curiosity guide you. Scientists are simply children who never grow up. They never lose their childlike sense of wonder.
I hope I myself haven’t grown up. I turned 30 years old this year. Yes, I know — unimaginably old! The Young Scientist Challenge splits my life in two: I was where you are now 15 years ago, in 2010.
Exactly 100 years before that, in 1910, Marie Curie was soon to win her second Nobel Prize. She is the only person — man or woman — ever to win two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
In World War I, Curie used her discovery of radioactivity, for which she won her first Nobel Prize, to create mobile X-ray units affectionately called “petite Curies”, which were used to treat over a million wounded soldiers in the war. Curie herself tragically died because of her own research — she suffered from complications due to radiation exposure — but she used her research to save other people’s lives.
Curie did something else in the war: She tried to give away what little gold she had, including her gold Nobel Prize medals, to support the war effort. She knew, in science and life, that some things are more important than prizes. Like wonder, and the good it can create.
Regardless of who wins today, remember that we are all gathered here to celebrate the wonder each one of you has captured and conveyed. You now have amazing new friends and peers, and I hope you’ll consider me one of them. You will go home with something far more valuable than any prize could ever be: the fellowship of dreamers and the friendship of those similar souls who cannot help but look more closely and think more deeply to delight in Nature‘s secrets.
Congratulations to all of you, and may your future be full of wonder.