Maya Burhanpurkar
Although Maya prototyped an “intelligent antibiotic” at the age of 12 and discovered promising novel cardio-protective properties of two experimental Alzheimer’s drugs at the age of 13, she is perhaps best known for discovering the physical nature of a new property in Newtonian physics; last year at the age of 14, she became the first person to directly measure the enigmatic property of “Absement”, the time-integral of distance, in a physical system as the principal investigator with her colleagues at the University of Toronto’s faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Like many fundamental properties, such as the Higgs boson and gravitational waves, that have been theoretically calculated for years but only recently measured, Absement has been theorized to exist and been calculated mathematically, but never before actually detected and measured in the real world. Her work is believed to represent a major addition to Newton’s standard model of fundamental kinematics and may have profound applications in fields ranging from fluid dynamics to aircraft systems.
Today at the age of 15, Maya is passionate about engaging young people in the sciences and currently serves as the youngest President of the national non-profit organization Science Expo, which, with a staff of over 120 volunteers, provides science outreach to more than 75 000 students nationwide. She has travelled to the Arctic to film a climate change documentary and has founded a tech startup to help bring medical aid to impoverished regions of the world. She has served on the Education Minister’s Student Advisory Council and she was elected as the Student Mayor of her city, Barrie, Ontario. She is currently her high school’s Student Council President and an elected Student Trustee at the Simcoe County District School Board.
Maya has been a featured keynote speaker at such prestigious events as TEDx (http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Talent-Diversity-Maya-Burhanpurk) and the Thiel Under 20 Foundation and has appeared on CBC’s “The National” and Radio One, CTV News, the Global Morning Show, TVO Kids, the Huffington Post, and Microsoft’s Global Citizenship homepage. She has received numerous national and international awards including the national “Top 20 Under 20” award, the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal, the Google International Science Fair Global Semi-Finalist award, the Canada-Wide Science Fair Grand Platinum award, and Ontario’s Junior Citizen of the Year award.
To find out more about Maya’s Canada-Wide Science Fair 2011 Project by clicking here:
https://secure.youthscience.ca/virtualcwsf/projectdetails.php?id=3444&year=&province=&keyword=&name=stephane%20chenard&categoryid=&divisionid=&challengeid=®ionid=
To find out more about Maya’s Canada-Wide Science Fair 2012 Project by clicking here:
https://secure.youthscience.ca/virtualcwsf/projectdetails.php?id=3444&year=&province=&keyword=&name=stephane%20chenard&categoryid=&divisionid=&challengeid=®ionid=
To find out more about Maya’s Canada-Wide Science Fair 2014 Project by clicking here:
https://secure.youthscience.ca/virtualcwsf/projectdetails.php?id=3444&year=&province=&keyword=&name=stephane%20chenard&categoryid=&divisionid=&challengeid=®ionid=
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