Time Magazine is famous for selecting the 100 most influential people and person of the year from around the world every year. Last year, they also selected "Kid of the Year" for the first time, with 15-year-old American young scientist Gitanjali Rao as the first chosen. She is a scientist and inventor who recognizes social problems such as pollution and cyberbullying and creatively solves them with her firm will. Let's look at her life striving for social innovation, saying that science and technology are ways to change the future of the younger generation.

  Gitanjali Rao was born in 2005 and is now living in the U.S.A. in the state of Colorado, has been an inventor and scientist since childhood. In an interview with Angelina Jolie in Time, she said she had been a child who wanted to make people smile and be happy since she was very young, and she thought about how to bring positivity to our world. In the second and third grades, she thought science and technology could bring social change, thinking about the specific ways to bring the change. Then, after she suffered from the Flint Water Crisis in Michigan, which began in 2014 and was so serious that a federal state of emergency was declared, she found that it took time and money to detect lead contamination in the water. Which is why she wanted to make an easy, simple, and inexpensive device for her parents, the local residents, as well as other people in places like Flint around the world who suffer from the same problem. Inspired by an MIT project[1], she invented Tethys, a device that can detect lead in water using carbon nanotube sensors, in 2017 after about two years of research with Denver Water. According to CNN, it was praised for its easy and quick detection of lead, and she was named “America’s Top Young Scientist" in 2017 at the age of 11. Meanwhile, recognizing the seriousness of the cyberbullying problem recently, she created an app called "Kindly" on SNS that prevents cyberbullying based on AI technology. "Kindly" is a service that informs whether the words and phrases that teenagers enter are violent and suggests modifying the contents before sending a message containing violent content to the other person. Rao explained that as a teenager, she knows that teenagers sometimes lash out, but that she invented the app to give them a chance to think about what they were trying to say and to give them a chance to be careful next time from an early age. Finally, she became Time's first "Kid of the Year" in 2020 after being recognized for her continuous efforts to solve social problems.

  In an interview with Time, Rao said, "There are still many social problems that we need to solve," expressing her firm commitment to solving social problems. Even though she is young, there is little doubt that she will change the world in the future because she continues to solve the problems she recognized in the community, such as cyberbullying and water pollution, by applying science and technology.