Daijiworld Media Network - Bengaluru (SP)
Bengaluru, Jun 8: It is a proud occasion for Sahithin Pingali, a class 12 student of Inventure Academy in the city. Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has the right to name minor planets, has decided to name a minor planet in Milky Way Galaxy after her.
Sahithi got this recognition on the basis of her research work titled 'on the specks of the froth of Bengaluru's polluted lakes'. For this work, she won the world's largest pre-college science competition titled Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, Los Angeles.
Sahithi got the top award on the basis of research done by her on 'an innovative crowdsourcing approach to monitoring freshwater bodies' at The International Sustainable World Engineering Energy Environment Project Olympiad held at Texas sometime back. The Lincoln Laboratory, taking into account Sahithi's achievement in being counted among the top 3 percent of Intel Fair, decided to confer on her the honour of naming a minor planet after her.
In the finals of the INTEL event, Sahithi Pingali, apart from bagging second place in the category, Earth and Environmental Sciences, also got three special awards. She was among two thousand finalists at the event which developed a mobile phone opp for lake monitoring through crowdsourcing.
Sahithi currently is working in association with PhD students and professors in civil and environmental engineering department besides pursuing internship in the University of Michigan. She had won scholarship from Inventure Academy to take part in the American Indian Foundation programme in 2015.
Sahithi says that crowdsourcing through which studetnts and citizens are encouraged to provide scientific data makes her project very interesting. She said that high school level students had the capacity to gather reliable data towards increasing environmental awareness. She is keen that students from the city adopt lakes, which she feels, will in course of time, be adopted by other countries across the world.