Bengaluru: A Bengaluru girl will have a minor planet in the Milky Way named after her for her research, “An Innovative Crowdsourcing Approach to Monitoring Freshwater Bodies” on polluted lakes.
Sahithi Pingali, who is currently pursuing an internship at the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department of the University of Michigan, got her name etched on the Milky Way after she excelled in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), the world’s largest pre-college science competition and was one of the 2,000 finalists.
Pingali, a Class 12 student of Inventure Academy, Bengaluru developed an integrated mobile phone app and lake monitoring kit for obtaining data through crowdsourcing. She presented her paper “An Innovative Crowdsourcing Approach to Monitoring Freshwater Bodies” based on her experiences with the help of the app.
Since Pingali came within the top 3 percent of ISEF, the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which has the right to name minor planets decided to name a planet.
Pingali also won three special awards and was awarded “overall second place” in the Earth and Environment Sciences category.
Currently, she is to further improve her method to detect water pollution. “I want to make it more accurate and expand it to detect arsenic,” she said.
Pingali has already received Gold Medal at ISWEEEP (The International Sustainable World Engineering Energy Environment Project) Olympiad at Houston (US) for her work on Varthur Lake.
