Anurudh Ganesan, Deepika Kurup and Pranav Sivakumar and three other Indian-origin teens are among those named winners of the 2015 Google Science Fair announced last month.

Indian Americans Anurudh Ganesan, Deepika Kurup and Pranav Sivakumar won the Lego Education Builder, National Geographic Explorer and Virgin Galactic Pioneer awards, respectively.

Girish Kumar, of Singapore; Lalita Prasida Sripada Srisai, of India; and Krtin Nithiyanandam of the United Kingdom were honored with the Google Technologist, Community Impact and Scientific American Innovator awards, respectively.

A total of nine people were named winners.

Ganesan, a 15-year-old from Maryland, won for his project called VAXXWAGON, an innovative eco-friendly, “no ice, no electric” active refrigeration system for last-leg vaccine transportation.

He explains that the current last-leg vaccine transportation to remote locations requires both ice packs and electricity. With that being a problem in developing countries, the Indian American designed and developed a no ice, no electric active refrigeration vaccine transportation system.

“Not only is this system unique and innovative, but more importantly, it will solve the current global problem,” he said in his bio on the science fair’s Web site. “This patent-pending system will revolutionize last-leg vaccine transportation by maintaining viable vaccines in the safe and effective temperature range.”

“I am confident that VAXXWAGON will save countless lives by providing safe and effective vaccines globally,” he added.

Kurup, 17, of New Hampshire, won her award for a novel photocatalytic pervious composites for removing multiple classes of toxins from water.

The teen said that about one-ninth of the world’s population lacks access to clean water, with roughly 500,000 children dying each year as a result of water-related diseases.

“This unacceptable social injustice compelled me to find a solution to the world’s clean water problem,” she said. “I synthesized a novel pervious photocatalytic composite that integrates an enhanced advanced oxidation process with filtration to remove multiple classes of toxins from water. The composite is a catalyst that uses natural sunlight and raw materials that are readily available.”

What Kurup created has applications in point-of-use water purification systems, wastewater treatment plants and coatings for pervious concrete pavements.

Sivakumar, 15, of Illinois, created an automated search for gravitationally lensed quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The method, using SDSS DR12 data, was utilized to examine the properties of target quasars and their neighbors to determine whether these two SDSS objects were images of the same quasar.

According to Sivakumar, the algorithm he created not only identified 56 lensed quasars reported in the literature, but also identified 109 new high-probability candidates.

Kumar won his award with the project “RevUP: Automatically Generating Questions from Educational Texts.” He said that the continued crafting of varied recall and application questions can be extremely time- and resource-intensive for teachers; thus, he built RevUp, which generates gap-fill multiple choice questions from online texts automatically.

Srisai conducted her project on a low-cost bio-adsorbent. She said in her page that, “Aquatic ecosystems support various life forms. Discharge of contaminants into water bodies is a matter of concern all over the world; thus, the waste water released from different sources should be purified at the source.”

Her project has a goal to clean waste water by flowing through different layers of corn cobs, which is “a cost-effective and simple technique.”

Nithiyanandam won for his project developing a molecular Trojan horse for the earlier, minimally-invasive diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. He developed a quantum dot probe that can potentially cross the blood-brain barrier and be used as a more sensitive, non-invasive diagnostic tool for the earlier diagnosis of Alzheimer's.

The Google Science Fair is a global online science and technology competition open to individuals and teams from ages 13 to 18. Olivia Hallisey, 16, of Connecticut, was the grand prize winner of the fair for her Ebola detection project.

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