20 Under 40: Young Shapers of the Future (Science and Technology)
The future is unwritten. It is also right around the corner. And if, as science fiction author William Gibson noted, it is not evenly distributed, more and more young people around the world are reaching toward it to shape it, improve it, and make it more equitable. These “shapers of the future” work in many fields and endeavors, embracing every corner and intersection of health and medicine, science and technology, and business and entrepreneurship. They are people of ideas, framing the intellectual questions and concerns that will guide future thought. They are scholars, builders, designers, architects, artists, teachers, writers, musicians, and social leaders. While under the age of 40 (as of January 2022), the 200 shapers of the future that we will highlight in this series have already left their mark on the present, and we expect to see much more invention, innovation, creation, and interpretation from them in the time to come.
Kazunori Akiyama (34)
Kazunori Akiyama took a bachelor’s degree in physics at Hokkaido University in Japan and then a master’s degree and doctorate in astronomy at the University of Tokyo. While working at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Akiyama signed on to an international project that would come to be called the Event Horizon Telescope. He made many contributions to early EHT research, including observations of the supermassive black hole M87, which would not be captured photographically until 2019, when Akiyama himself became the first scientist to produce its image. After presenting a prizewinning doctoral dissertation, Akiyama became a postdoctoral fellow at MIT Haystack Observatory, in northeastern Massachusetts, where he developed new imaging techniques and a software package named SMILI, which he used to create the first images of M87. He is the joint leader of the international team that records those images. The techniques and tools he developed for the EHT have also enabled Akiyama to study fast radio bursts and relativistic jets powered by supermassive black holes. In addition, he has worked with astrophysicists studying protoplanetary disks, stars, and galaxies, using Faraday tomography and other imaging applications.
Sheena Allen (32)
Sheena Allen was born in Terry, Mississippi, a farm town near Jackson. She earned a dual bachelor’s degree in film and psychology from the University of Southern Mississippi. Having taught herself coding, in her senior year she launched her first company, Sheena Allen Apps, and eventually sold millions of downloaded programs. Her second technology start-up earned Allen the distinction of being the youngest woman in the United States to own a digital bank. The fintech (financial technology) company connects underserved young people and minority communities to the modern cashless economy, providing financial services and microloans that permit customers to operate without the need to resort to predatory lenders and offering lines of credit combined with financial education about their responsible use. “There is a way to be profitable while focusing on this group and not robbing them,” she has said. Allen was portrayed in the 2016 documentary film She Started It, about women in start-up technology concerns. The following year she published a memoir, The Starting Guide, which features suggestions on how other women can build their own technology firms.
Lefteris Arapakis (27)
Born in Piraeus, the port of Athens, Lefteris Arapakis descends from a long line of deepwater commercial fishers and has worked the sea himself, although he jokingly says he is “the worst fisherman in Greece.” After graduating from Athens University of Economics and Business, Arapakis cofounded an organization called Enaleia (Greek for “one with the fishermen”) in 2016. Blending science, education, entrepreneurship, and environmentalism, Enaleia teaches sustainable fishing to young people. As Arapakis told an interviewer, “We teach students not just how to fish, but also how to fish so fish can exist tomorrow.” Enaleia is the first professional fishing school in the country. After the coronavirus pandemic arrived, the school transitioned to online instruction. In addition, the organization offers incentives for working fishers to collect plastics from the sea, cleaning the marine environment and providing safer habitats for fish and other aquatic life. By early 2022 Enaleia was operating out of more than 20 Greek and Italian ports, having built an alliance of more than 1,500 people and 300 vessels. The Saronic Gulf, Piraeus’s home waters, is markedly cleaner already. In 2020 the United Nations Environment Programme named Arapakis Europe’s Young Champion of the Earth. Enaleia is now developing prototypes to recycle sea plastic into garments such as socks and swimsuits.
Joy Buolamwini (31)
Born in Edmonton, Alberta, to Ghanaian parents, Joy Buolamwini earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science with highest honors at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She worked as a programmer and chief technological officer at several firms before becoming a Fulbright fellow in Zambia and a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford. While in graduate school at MIT, she determined that facial recognition software carried a bias for white faces, a thesis she proved by donning a white mask while coding for that recognition. Subsequent testing proved gender bias as well. She testified before the U.S. House Oversight Committee in 2019 about problematic algorithms and the people who are immediately affected by them, such as a Muslim college student who was coded as a wanted terrorist and a group of renters of color who were at risk of being denied access to their homes by a facial-recognition entry system. In 2016 Buolamwini, who calls herself a “poet of code,” founded the Algorithmic Justice League, which is committed to educating underprivileged communities in the use of technology and to battling ethnic and gender bias.
Caleb Carr (27)
Born in Portland, Oregon, and holding both U.S. and New Zealand citizenship (the latter thanks to his immigrant parents), Caleb Carr witnessed a traumatic event as a teenager. While he was training at the age of 15 to qualify for a search-and-rescue team, his instructor collapsed, the victim of a heart attack. A rescue helicopter arrived, but wind as well as tree cover prevented it from landing or lowering a rescue basket. As a college student, Carr vowed to develop rescue baskets that could remain stable even in very windy conditions. He finally arrived at a solution that uses an array of fans and sensors. Today based in Broomfield, Colorado, where he heads the company Vita Inclinata, Carr has secured funding from the U.S. military and a Japanese venture capital firm and now employs two dozen people who are working to produce his dream solution at an industrial scale and to develop related products.
Ashfaq Mehmood Choudhary (18)
As a teenager living in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, near the Chinese border, Ashfaq Mehmood Choudhary was well accustomed to using applications developed in China on his cell phone. But in 2020, following a border dispute between the two countries, most of those apps were removed from the Indian market because of concerns that they allowed their manufacturers to access too much private information and thus could serve as secret surveillance tools. At the same time, the government of India announced an initiative to promote Indian-made software. Choudhary set to work, and he developed an app called Dodo Drop, which allows users to transfer data—texts, audio recordings, photographs, and so forth—between phones without Internet access. Such transfers can take place between mobile and desktop devices at speeds up to 480 Mbps (megabits per second), and, because they are encrypted, they are secure. “I want to develop global-standard apps for India,” Choudhary told an interviewer. With his user-friendly file-sharing app, he has made a promising start.
Mohamed Dhaouafi (29)
A native of Tunisia, Mohamed Dhaouafi was studying electronic engineering at the École National d’Ingénieurs de Sousse when he met a student whose young cousin had been born without arms and whose parents could not afford to buy her prosthetic limbs until she attained her adult dimensions. Dhaouafi later visited a pediatric hospital and met a boy who had lost two limbs in an accident. He determined then and there that, using 3D printing technologies and other innovations, he would manufacture affordable and easily changed prosthetic devices for clients in Africa and the Middle East. To that end, he earned a master’s degree in management and then founded CureBionics. Besides developing prosthetics, Dhaouafi produced a virtual reality program that teaches wearers how to use the devices. The prosthetics are controlled by muscles, so there is no need for surgical interventions, and they are relatively easy to use, thanks to embedded AI algorithms. Dhaouafi is also the founder and chief operating officer of Agaruw, an environmentally sustainable fashion tech start-up.
Wei Gao (36)
Born in China, Wei Gao came to the United States on an international research fellowship and earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of California, San Diego, in 2014. He is now an assistant professor of medical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. A nanorobotics specialist with a gift for novel solutions to old problems, Gao has developed skin-interfaced biosensors that can detect the presence of diseased tissue or organs through sweat rather than blood, allowing for noninvasive instant analyses and timely medical treatment. According to Gao, “The vital signs and molecular information collected using this platform could be used to design and optimize next-generation prosthetics.” He is now working in nanorobotics, developing tiny machines that can enter the human bloodstream to detect and neutralize cancer cells, and he expects China to become a leader in this field in the near term. Gao was selected as a young scientist of international importance in 2020 by the World Economic Forum.
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Pham Hy Hieu (29)
A native of Vietnam, Pham Hy Hieu showed an aptitude for mathematics while a primary-school student. By intermediate school, however, he was beginning to have such difficulty with the subject that his father discouraged him from applying to a high school for gifted students. Hieu persevered, however, applying himself with so much rigor that he won medals at two math competitions. He was awarded a scholarship to attend the National University of Singapore, but Hieu had long dreamed of attending college in the United States. After receiving a four-year scholarship to attend Stanford University, Hieu studied mathematics there with a linguist who set him to work applying algorithms to automatic machine translation. That effort introduced Hieu to AI, a field he studied in greater depth while working toward his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University. His doctoral thesis centered on reducing the costs of training AI, and that brought him to the attention of Google, which hired him to economize the training of its AI systems. Hieu believes that, while there is considerable international competition to lead in AI today, particularly between the United States and China, in a hundred years the outlook will be different, and countries will instead ask, “How can we cooperate for development?”
Atima Lui (31)
Atima Lui was born in Topeka, Kansas, the daughter of a Black activist mother and a father who had fled from Sudan during a time of famine and civil war. Academically gifted, she attended secondary school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and graduated in 2008. She then enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, because of its program in entrepreneurship. There she developed a business plan for, and then ran, a beauty salon. While earning a master’s degree in business administration at Harvard Business School, Lui became fascinated by applications of technology to social concerns. That led her to conceive of the Nudemeter, an AI-based computer vision tool that corrects for bias in cosmetics by providing exact matches of makeup with skin color and tone. Lui is marketing this technology in both the United States and Africa, which she considers an underserved but immensely important market that, thanks to advances in transportation and communication, need not be commercially isolated.
Ann Makosinski (24)
Born in a suburb of Victoria, British Columbia, Ann Makosinski won a seventh-grade science fair by developing a means to power a small radio with the waste heat of a candle. Having taken an early interest in recovering such lost energy, she was all of 15 when she won the 2013 Google Science Fair for her “hollow flashlight,” which does not require batteries but instead uses heat from the holder’s hand to generate electricity via Peltier tiles—a potential boon for communities in developing countries where batteries are expensive and in short supply. Makosinski next developed what she called the eDrink, a mug that uses heat from hot coffee or the like to charge a cell phone. (In a TEDx talk she presented in 2016, she discussed why she preferred an old-school flip phone to a smartphone, not having owned any kind of cell phone until she was 18.) While still a university student, Makosinski held several patents and formed her own technology firm, Makotronics.
Kazumi Muraki (21)
Born in Yamanashi prefecture, in central Japan, Kazumi Muraki knew when he was just two years old that he wanted to be a scientist. He traveled outside the prefecture monthly to attend a science school in Tokyo and then transferred to a specialized elementary school closer to home where gifted children could study science at a near-university level. When he was in high school, Muraki developed a suitcase-sized solar-powered device that can remove CO2 from the air. His initial goal, he said, was to help make Mars habitable, but it took him little time to realize that his device, at scale, could be used to remove excess CO2 from Earth’s atmosphere. While studying at the University of Tokyo, he focused on prompting chemical reactions in CO2 to produce methane, which can be used as a fuel or to manufacture materials, such as for clothing, now made with petroleum products.
Sidy Ndao (38)
Sidy Ndao was born in Dakar, Senegal. He immigrated to the United States and studied mechanical engineering at the City College of New York, earning a bachelor’s degree in 2005. He went on to receive a doctorate in the same field from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2010 and then became an associate professor in materials and mechanical engineering at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in 2018. Ndao’s Nano and Microsystems Research Lab is working to build the world’s first thermal computer, using heat instead of electricity to process data. Such computers could be used to explore outer space and Earth’s deep subterranean geology and to harness waste heat for more-efficient energy use. Ndao holds several patents, including one in microfluidics awarded in 2020, and is a fellow of the Next Einstein Forum. Along with his other work, he actively promotes STEM education in Africa through an organization he founded called SenEcole, which hosts the Pan-African Robotics Competition, and through the Dakar American University of Science & Technology, which he founded.
Lillian Kay Petersen (19)
While a senior at Los Alamos High School in New Mexico, Lillian Kay Petersen won the 2020 Regeneron Science Talent Search competition and a $250,000 scholarship for her development of a scientific model to reduce food insecurity by accurately predicting crop yields. She was just 17 years old. Her interest came in part from having three adopted siblings who had suffered from food insecurity. She was also spurred to action after learning more about the challenges being faced in Ethiopia, where inconsistent crops, drought, and climate change make it difficult to forecast harvests and thus head off significant food insecurity. Petersen learned about the effects of climate on agriculture and, putting her computer skills to work, developed a simple model, accessible to local farmers, that enables them to predict harvests early in the growing season. That model, which employs satellite data, is also of great use to governmental and nongovernmental organizations that work to mitigate problems of food security and distribution. Petersen’s work has been published in peer-reviewed journals. She went on to attend Harvard College.
Gitanjali Rao (16)
A resident of a Denver-area suburb, Gitanjali Rao gained renown at 11 as the winner of the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, earning the title “America’s Top Young Scientist” by developing a sensor-based device called Tethys that tests water for the presence of lead much faster than any other method available. Having been inspired to seek this solution by watching news reports about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, she intends to continue working in environmental sciences to decrease water contamination and lead exposure. Rao attended a STEM school in the Denver suburbs and plans to attend MIT, on whose website she first read about the carbon nanotubes on which Tethys relies. She hopes to build Tethys to a scale that is suitable for installation in individual homes so that everyone has access to clean drinking water, a problem of paramount importance today. As befits a student who is still in high school, she also developed an anti-bullying AI algorithm. What’s more, she created an app to help treat opioid addiction, and she published A Young Innovator’s Guide to STEM.
Siegfried Rasthofer (~34)
As a child in Germany, Siegfried Rasthofer was fascinated by computers. In his teens he programmed nondestructive viruses simply to understand how they worked. He carried that interest into his university education, earning a B.S. from the University of Applied Sciences in Landshut, an M.Sc. at the University of Passau, and a Ph.D. at the Technical University of Darmstadt. As part of his dissertation, he developed a software tool that could examine computer systems and applications for security weaknesses—whether, for example, a program might install malicious code under the cover of doing something useful. Upon completing his doctorate, Rasthofer worked as a security researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology, where he and others further developed the tool he had created for his dissertation into CodeInspect, which automatically analyzes the behavior of Android apps to detect and combat malware. In one notable case, CodeInspect detected and disarmed a Trojan horse that threatened to drain the bank accounts of tens of thousands of South Koreans. He also worked for Siemens and Microsoft before applying his cybersecurity expertise at MunichRE, a global insurance firm. In 2020 Rasthofer was honored with the Curious Mind Researcher Prize, given to researchers under 40 whose work shows significant promise for the German economy.
Rebecca Saive (34)
Born in Germany, Rebecca Saive is a researcher in materials science who developed a means of improving photovoltaic panels, adding to their efficiency and lowering their cost. The technology involves 3D-printing new photovoltaic contact sheets and then applying them to older panels so that existing systems can be improved rather than discarded. Other areas of Saive’s research include optical modeling to improve solar cell performance, as well as nanoscale fabrication and measurement. She has led breakthroughs in nanotechnology, organic electronics, nanophotonics, and plasmonic functions. Saive studied and did research at the Technical University of Munich, Heidelberg University, and the California Institute of Technology, where she cofounded the company ETC Solar. She then became an assistant professor of physics and materials science at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. There her research group is developing photonic materials systems and light-energy conversion technologies, guided by computational optical and device modeling, that are meant to be applied to photovoltaic power systems and nanodevices.
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Boyan Slat (27)
Born in Delft, Netherlands, Boyan Slat studied aerodynamics and aerospace engineering before leaving college at the age of 18 to found the Ocean Cleanup. Inspired by a diving trip to Greece in which he saw up close the effects of plastic pollution in marine environments, his eco-entrepreneurial enterprise uses boom technology to remove plastics from ocean waters. His goal is to eliminate 90 percent of the plastics that are now afloat. Though Slat’s early designs failed, his determination and persistence paid off with a device that succeeded in a 2018 test run in removing several tons of plastics from the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Slat believes that, with enough such devices, ocean cleanup can be effected in years rather than centuries. He has received many awards for his work, and he currently advises the European Union on innovation policy and programs.
Corina Tarnita (39)
Raised on her grandparents’ farm in Romania while her parents finished their education and sought employment—her father as an orthopedic surgeon and her mother as a professor of engineering—Corina Tarnita developed a fascination with animals early in life. She also proved herself an extraordinary mathematician, winning the country’s Mathematical Olympiad three times between 1999 and 2001. With a scholarship in hand, she earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Harvard University and was one of only two math students at Harvard in five years to be invited to go on to graduate school there. Tarnita eventually won the math department’s prize for best doctoral thesis. However, she soon switched her focus from pure mathematics to mathematical biology. Her interest in mathematical modeling, game theory, and the phenomenon of self-organization led her to study social insects such as termites and ants, working with noted Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson. In that connection, she said, “If you pose to me a question about social insects, I will embrace it because I know I will learn something amazing from that. That’s what I learned from E.O. Wilson and the ants.” Now a full professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, Tarnita describes her present research interest as “the organization and emergent properties of complex adaptive systems at multiple scales, from single cells to entire ecosystems.”
Jeremiah Thoronka (21)
Jeremiah Thoronka was born amid civil war in Sierra Leone, and he grew up in a camp for displaced and homeless people on the outskirts of the capital, Freetown. There he observed that a lack of electricity had harmful effects on young students who had to rely on candles and flashlights to study at night. This “energy poverty” is widespread in the country, only a quarter of whose people have direct access to electricity. As a 17-year-old student at the African Leadership University in Kigali, Rwanda, Thoronka launched a firm called Optim Energy that uses the vibrations from passing automobile and foot traffic on specially designed pavement to generate electricity. Pilot programs in two Freetown neighborhoods proved that Thoronka’s design worked, and Optim has delivered electric power to some 15 schools with a collective student population of about 9,000. For his accomplishments, Jeremiah was named one of the Top 100 Young African Conservation Leaders by a consortium of international organizations. As a graduate student in sustainability at Durham University in England, he received the inaugural Global Student Prize in 2021.