“For me, it’s about trying to use science to solve world problems,” said the 14-year-old. “My big goal is to use science to solve the problem of global warming and climate change.”
In December, she decided to embark on a project to design a better diagnostic test to help solve an equally pressing challenge facing the world: the spread of variants of COVID-19.
“I didn’t have access to a lab or anything,” she said. Instead, she found online databases of results and designs for existing tests. “(The current tests) only detect variants that have DNA (RNA) that perfectly match to what’s used in the test, so the problem is: if there’s a mutation, the test will no longer detect that variant.”
She presented her project and her findings in a series of videos.
“I still think it’s super-important to have a test that detects all variants, because we don’t want to have a ton of cases of a variant and not be able to detect it at all,” she said.
Her work earned the Middle School State Gold Award at the Minnesota State Science and Engineering Fair in March, along with the 3m Innovation Award, 2nd place in the Beckman Coulter Foundation middle school science fair, and the Broadcom Masters Award, recognizing the top ten percent of middle school student projects.
“It’s not about having people recognize me but having people be able to have a solution to this problem and find some sort of normal in the world that doesn’t involve having a global pandemic,” Levinshteyn said.
