AMERICAN INGENUITY AWARD.
A teenager of Indian origin is one of the recipients of prestigious American Ingenuity Award (youth), for his breakthrough research for infrared detector. As a freshman at MIT he had five peer-reviewed scientific papers to his name, but no driver’s license. He spent much of high school in an electrical engineering lab at Virginia Commonwealth University, wearing a hairnet and tinkering with nanowires, his dad was a professor there.
His name is Saumil Bandyopadhyay, driving terrified him. He started learning driving on his mom’s Honda Civic, but soon dropped the notion. Instead, he devoted his attention to a unique infrared detector, which may one day reduce car crash rates by allowing vehicles to sense each other in fog or darkness. The nanoscale contraption, which to the uneducated eye looks like a silver postage stamp, might also someday help spy on stellar nurseries, detect hidden land mines and monitor global warming. Most exciting, it operates at room temperature, without the cumbersome and expensive tanks of liquid nitrogen needed to cool most other infrared sensors.
As per the article on smithsonianmag.com, “It’s a breakthrough—a different way of measuring infrared,” says Gary Tepper, a VCU professor who tutored Bandyopadhyay on one aspect of the project. When John Mather, the Nobel laureate astrophysicist, noticed the infrared device at an Intel Science Fair, he invited Bandyopadhyay to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to discuss it. “I thought it was an ingenious idea,” Mather says. “He’s a brilliant kid.” The device has also attracted the interest of the U.S. Army.
American Ingenuity Awards are announced by Smithsonian Magazine. This is the second year for these awards, offered to ten individuals across different categories for their innovations
