Shanya Gill

Shanya Gill couldn’t stop thinking about the restaurant behind her house in San Jose, Calif., that burned down in 2022. Neither could her family. Her mom became paranoid and always double-checked to make sure their stove was turned off.

Shanya, now 13, learned that unattended cooking is the leading factor in home fires—accounting for one-third of incidents. She felt that smoke detectors weren’t always effective in providing an urgent warning, so she set out to create a device that alerts users to fires before they even start. “What I realized is that ... I could learn how to code and I could really make a change,” she says.

Shanya’s invention uses a thermal camera and a small computer to detect unattended heat sources; if it’s been two minutes and there’s no sign of humans, it sends a text to the user to warn of a potential fire. That idea helped her win the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge, a prestigious science competition for middle schoolers in the U.S. Her invention and leadership skills during a week in D.C. helped her beat 2,000 other applicants for a $25,000 prize. (About 65,000 middle schoolers compete in affiliated science fairs—and of those, the top 10% are eligible to apply for the competition.) “That was kind of an aha! moment for me ... Oh, I can actually do this,” she says. The annual competition is organized by Society for Science, a nonprofit focused on promoting equity in STEM, hosting science competitions and publishing a magazine.

Maya Ajmera, president of the Society for Science, says Shanya’s project stood out because it tapped into an innovative way of using engineering to solve a real-life problem. According to the National Fire Protection Association, one-quarter of the roughly 1.5 million fires in 2022 occurred in homes and caused more than 2,700 deaths—that’s almost three-quarters of the total civilian death toll from fires that year. Ajmera is also impressed by how Shanya kept working. “She didn’t just stop with the project ... she’s made connections with the community that’s most impacted by it ... the firemen and women putting out fires,” Ajmera says.

Shanya met Lori Moore-Merrell, who leads the U.S. Fire Administration, at its headquarters in March. “I thought it would be a quick in-and-out thing,” Shanya says. But she was wrong. “She knew what my product was,” she adds. The federal agency is helping Shanya try to fund the app and launch it at a greater scale. Currently, the only test trial is in her house. But “the product is pretty much almost done,” Shanya says.

One improvement occurred to her while at the competition in D.C. She realized that AI is a lot faster than Python, so she’s changing up the programming. Shanya has put her code up on GitHub, which is open source, so people can make suggestions on how to improve the program, which still has some bugs. She didn’t want to patent the technology. “If I was the sole creator, it’d be hard to get it everywhere,” she says. “But I just want other people to be safe—and I want people to feel safe in their own homes.”

Shanya says she used to struggle with insecurities tied to her body image, and was called names because of her size. But in recent years, she has developed a healthier self-image, and working on the project has helped her build confidence. “Innovation can have a lot of impact—not only on the people you’re helping, but also on yourself,” she says.