2024 winner
David Zhang He
United States
David He is a sixteen-year-old STEM enthusiast living in California. For his Rise project, David addressed the environmental impact of marine polyurethane microplastics, which are widely used in industrial applications, and therefore often tend to concentrate and pollute marine environments. He did so by using plasmids to genetically engineer two polyurethanase enzymes into an ocean bacterium, Alteromonas macleodii. The resulting bacterium demonstrated significant evidence of polyurethane film degradation in a lab ocean-simulated environment after one month of incubation. David looks forward to the future, where he wonders how biotech and genetics will continue to progress and revolutionize the world. David enjoys hiking, chess, tennis, and violin in his spare time.