Interesting An Indian-origin Students Who Have Made the Nation Proud

Students of Indian origin who have excelled in international competitions

Here’s a list of some of the NRIs who have aced the game in global competitions:

• Dev Shah, America’s Spelling Bee Winner 2023 (2023),

Dev Shah, a 14-year-old eighth-grade student from Florida, won the 2023 spelling bee after completing 14 rounds of difficult-to-spell words like “probouleutic,” “zwitterion,” and “schistorrhachis.”

He ended up winning $50,000 and a commemorative medal, outperforming 228 other competitors.

Since 1999, 27 Indian Americans have consistently won the spelling bee.

• Medha Gupta, developer of the Safe Travel App for Girls (2018).

Medha Gupta, a sophomore at Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, felt unsafe walking home from the school bus.

In response to this problem, she devised a solution that would benefit not only herself but all girls in general.

Medha created Safe Travel, an iOS app that allows users to program it to send an alert to someone they trust if they fail to arrive at a destination within a set time.

This app helped her win the annual Congressional App Challenge for Virginia’s 10th District, beating out 1,300 other apps.

• Shreya Ramachandran, the Gloria Barron Prize Winner (2018)

Shreya Ramachandran, 14 years old, won the Gloria Barron Prize in 2018 for her project, The Grey Water Project.

Her non-profit promotes safe gray water reuse and water conservation as a drought-relief strategy.

Indian-origin students helped the United States win the Math Olympiad (2015).

The United States won the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) after more than 20 years, thanks to two Indian-origin students: 17-year-old Shyam Narayanan and 18-year-old Yang Liu Patil.

The World Championship Mathematics Competition for High School Students (IMO) is held annually in a different country.

• Shivani Sud wins the ‘Junior Nobel’ (2008).

Shivani Sud, a 17-year-old Indian-American high school student, won first place in the Intel Science Talent Search competition in the United States for her cancer-related project.

Shivani received the ‘Junior Nobel’ for using bioinformatics and genomics to identify stage II colon cancer patients at high risk of recurrence and the best therapeutic agents for treating their tumors.