The Indian American community has made its presence felt in different walks of life, including education, business and politics, even though they constitute only 1% of the total US population. In our last article in the series of stories about young Indians, we gave a shout-out to 17-year-old Jothi Ramaswamy from New York who, inspired by her engineer mother, holds workshops to push girls for STEM careers as part of her nonprofit'ThinkSTEAM'. Indian American Kavya Kopparapu has received the most coveted National STEM Education Award 2019 for her revolutionary invention having the sole objective of making treatments far more effective for glioblastoma, the most fatal form of brain cancer. Recognized as an extraordinarily talented and accomplished individual by STEM Education US, Kavya Kopparapu is a science whizz of Herndon, Virginia. A student of biology and computer science at Harvard University, Kavya has invented an AI technology-supported device named GlioVision that pictures characteristics of brain tumor in shorter time and at a lesser cost than the existing traditional methods.

If, like me, you're one of those people who worries that you haven't accomplished much in your life, you probably shouldn't read this profile of Kavya Kopparapu, a teenager who has probably done more in her time at high school than I've done since I graduated. Most recently, she created a cheap, portable diagnosis system for a common eye affliction her grandfather suffers from, but which often goes undetected and leads to blindness. A 3D-printed mount and lens lets retinal scans be taken with an iPhone, and a machine learning system using readily available services and trained on thousands of such images does the diagnosis. She presented her work last month at O'Reilly's AI conference. You should read IEEE Spectrum's article and her blog -- again, though, only if you feel like staring into the distance and contemplating your own inadequacy.

When 16-year-old Kavya Kopparapu wasn't attending conferences, giving speeches, presiding over her school's bioinformatics society, organizing a research symposium, playing piano, and running a non-profit, she worried about what to do with all her free time. It was June 2016, the summer after her junior year in high school, and Kopparapu was looking for a new project that would use her computer science skills. Her thoughts quickly turned to her grandfather, who lives in a small city on India's eastern coast. In 2013 he began showing symptoms of diabetic retinopathy, a complication of diabetes that damages blood vessels in the retina and can lead to blindness. Eventually he was diagnosed and treated, but not before his vision deteriorated.