Latest news with #FutureLeadersAward
CBS News
14-04-2025
- Science
- CBS News
Future Leaders winner using technology in Colorado to create solutions
Throughout the school year, CBS Colorado, along with Chevron and Colorado School of Mines, recognizes six high school students who excel in science, technology, engineering and math, STEM. The Future Leaders Award comes with $1,000 and a profile on CBS News Colorado. The latest winner of the Future Leaders award is Siddhartha Aradhya, a senior at Rock Canyon High School in Douglas County. Aradhya is taking a full load of Advanced Placement classes, but that doesn't stop him from being on the track and cross country teams. He's also working on several projects outside of school. Aradhya had a firsthand experience with online predators. "We had a fake account, a fake Instagram account and we got a lot of weird messages on it. We took it to the police," he explained. From that interaction, Aradhya got the idea to write CatchChat, a program that helps law enforcement catfish online predators. "They're not always trained to talk like, say, a 16-year-old girl," Aradhya said of investigators. The AI in CatchChat can do it for them. Type the offender's message into the program, and it can give you appropriate emojis or slang to continue the conversation. Right now, the Douglas County Sheriff's Department is testing the program for Aradhya. "The goal is that we want to automize the process fully so the police officers who are trained to do so many incredible things can then go do those incredible things and not have to do something that they're not trained at," Aradhya said. Aradhya created another computer program to help workers identify if water is tainted. "It's just a program where you'd upload microscopic images and ou'd see whether they're certain types of algae," he said. Algae blooms are toxic in drinking water, so Aradhya is developing a drone that would emit light to kill algae. This project is in the testing phase. "There's different parts of the experiment that you want to test, like what type of light? How far the light should go?" "Is the environment kind of a passion of yours?" asked First Alert Chief Meteorologist Dave Aguilera. "I really like dinosaurs," Aradhya replied. "I've just always been interested in like environments and the natural world." "Have you been out to Dinosaur Ridge?" Aguilera followed up. "Yea, I love Dinosaur Ridge," Aradhya answered. He also loves helping his fellow students. He served on the Student Advisory Committee to the Douglas County School Board. "I was more involved with financial literacy, so like getting a curriculum across schools that wouldn't interfere with students time that much," he said. "That's such a great idea because there's not much of that," Aguilera said. "Yea, you know how to do algebra but not your taxes," Aradhya said with a laugh. He expanded on those lessons and created a nonprofit called The More You Know. Now, he shares the knowledge with organizations that what to offer financial literacy to their clients. Aradhya plans to go to college but he hopes to find time to continue working on these projects that he's already started. "Specifically CatchChat is probably the one that I'm most excited about. I want to keep automaking that," he said. LINK: Future Leaders Award CBS News Colorado will be taking nominations for its Future Leaders Award through April 18, 2025.
CBS News
11-03-2025
- CBS News
Future Leaders winner sees problems, becomes part of the solution in Colorado
CBS Colorado along with its partners, Chevron and Colorado School of Mines, honor high school students who excel in science, technology, engineering, and math. The Future Leaders Award comes with $1,000 and a profile on CBS News Colorado. The most recent winner is Amy Xia, a junior at Cherry Creek High School. She is doing everything she can to make the world a better place. As part of a Cyber Leaders Program, Xia teaches coding to fourth graders at Holm Elementary School. "They are so fun to work with because I see a lot of myself in them," Xia explained. Cyber Leaders was started by a previous Future Leaders winner, Bryce Hunter. It's a club that meets before school in which high school students teach elementary school students how to create the code that makes robots and other computer programs work. "When I was in elementary school, we had a similar coding class except it was not engaging at all," Xia explained. "What I hope they take away from it is that computer science is for everybody." In addition to the work she does with the Holm Elementary students, Xia is working on her own coding project. She's building an app called Kiwi Kares. "So my inspiration for the app is based off my freshman year self," Xia said. "I ended up not taking care of myself at all. I realized I wasn't along in this. A lot of my friends were actually doing the exact same thing ... just pushing themselves way past the limit." The app makes self care into a game in which teens can get points when they do things to take care of themselves. Xia hopes the app will serve as a gentle reminder that drinking water, getting enough sleep, and regular exercise are as important as school work and extracurricular activities. "Plus Kiwis are super cute and fun," she added. The pandemic was a tough time for Xia and her family. "All four of my grandparents passed away in assisted living within a very short period of time, and this was during the COVID era, so I was unable to visit them and be there for them," she explained. The loss of her grandparents inspired Xia to become a certified nurse's assistant, so she could work in assisted living facilities. "I wanted to support people in that situation just to kind of make up for what I wasn't able to give my grandparents," Xia explained. In the wake of the pandemic when there were hospital staffing shortages, Xia started volunteering at Swedish Medical Center. She recently became a Certified Cuddler. "It's the cutest thing ever," she said. She does most of her cuddling in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, holding and helping the tiniest, sickest babies. "I started out as a very sick NICU baby, and I made it," she explained. "Kind of full circle moment just helping these other babies." During the summer and breaks from school, Xia can be found in a research lab at the Barbara Davis Center for Diabetes. "I'm very interested in the immune system in general. I have a long family history of autoimmunity and general immune failure. Xia started out shadowing the researchers. Now she has her own project under her mentor Dr. Soojin Kim. "We're just trying to model the disease in a cell line to better understand how it develops," Xia explained. She's working among researchers who may one day find a cure for Type 1 diabetes. "Just saying that this is going on ... actually happening in the lab is really cool to me, and also it brings some hope for the future," Xia said. Xia is also providing hope for the future. When she faces a challenge in her life, she becomes a part of the solution for other people. That's what makes her a Future Leader. If you know a high school student in Colorado who excels in STEM, nominate them for CBS Colorado's Future Leaders Award. We're accepting nominations through April 18, 2025.
CBS News
30-01-2025
- Science
- CBS News
Future Leaders Winner addressing society's biggest challenges
Throughout the school year, CBS Colorado, along with Chevron and Colorado School of Mines, recognizes high school students who excel in science, technology, engineering, and math or STEM. The Future Leaders Award includes $1,000 and a profile on CBS News Colorado. Nicholas Kruus is the latest Futures Leaders winner. Kruus is a senior at STEM School Highlands Ranch. He maintains a 4.7 GPA, got a score of 1580 on the SAT, and scored 5 out of 5 on all five Advanced Placement (AP) tests. Beyond his school work, he's doing critical thinking about some of society's biggest issues. In the last few years, Kruus has written or contributed to nearly a dozen research papers on a wide variety of topics. "I think my work currently really kind of focuses on the intersection of philosophy, specifically ethics, economics and politics," he explained. He's researched and written on topics like the gender gap in STEM, student mental health and stigma, and education in low-income countries. Most recently, he's been working on a report for the World Bank designed to improve forecasts of greenhouse gases. "The reason that this is very important and very motivating for me is that the recommendations that we're making should provide governments with more useful information to allow them to make their sustainability policies more effective," Kruus said. Kruus was in sixth grade when the shooting happened at STEM School Highlands Ranch. The next year COVID swept across the country. His formal learning was disrupted for several years. "I really struggled to learn during the pandemic," he recalled. "What started you on the journey of writing the research papers?" First Alert Meteorologist Dave Aguilera asked Kruus. "I was at a point in my life where I felt like I didn't have much meaning or fulfillment, and so I was quite, feeling really down because of that," he replied. "That's kind of when I started pursuing research because I saw this as a way that I could help contribute to society." He also contributed to the Yale Young Global Scholars program at Yale University. "This was really sort of an exciting opportunity to really sort of immerse myself in a group of people who are focused on trying to solve some of humanity's largest challenges," he said of the program. Kruus also did a fellowship with Non-Trivial, an online research program. "The fellowship aims to help high schoolers to have a positive social impact with a project, as well as provide them with mentorship and a network of people who have this shared goal," he said. Kruus is not afraid of a challenge or a deep dive into the internet. He worked with the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University and helped to summarize some of the Institute's more technical papers for a general audience. "I came to realize that I think that what makes life meaningful and what gives me purpose is trying to help others," Kruus told CBS News Colorado. Kruus will continue his research efforts in college, but he's not sure where he's going to go yet. He's also not exactly clear how he'll pursue his interests in the future, but he will definitely continue to think critically about society's most pressing problems. CBS Colorado is accepting nominations for its Future Leaders Award through April 18, 2025.
