13 year old schoolgirl Lalita Prasida Sripada Srisai from Odisha, India has won the Community Impact award at the Google Science Fair Award 2015. The Community Impact Award honors a project that makes a practical difference in the innovator’s community by addressing an environmental, health or resources challenge.
Lalita’s winning project covered “Low Cost Bio Adsorbent’ aimed at cleaning waste water through a cost-effective and simple technique that won her $10,000 in funding and a year-long mentorship from Scientific American to further help develop her winning project. Lalita is a student of class IX studying in Delhi Public School, Damanjodi located in the district of Koraput, Odisha. Full details on Lalita’s project is available on Google Science Fair website here.
Sharing her excitement on being announced the winner, Lalita said “I am really excited to have won the Google Community Impact Award both for my school and for my country as this will boost my insights and give me an opportunity to work further for solving local problems.”
This year, Google competition received over thousands entries in across 15 languages from which 90 regional and 20 global finalists were shortlisted and invited to Mountain View. The competition gave away a Grand Prize worth $50,000 in scholarship and various theme based awards across categories.
“Young people such as Lalita can and have made significant contributions to solving some of today’s greatest challenges. Through the Google Science Fair, we want to support and foster the next generation of scientists and engineers” said a Google spokesperson”.
