Natarajan among top 40 in national science talent search

major in engineering with an interdisciplinary approach.

“I’ve seen her mature and become more confident in what she’s doing,” Youngs said. “She’ll step back and look at her whole poster and move things so she thinks her research is better displayed. She really works on that.

“I think her niche is in the environmental arena. I definitely have to say she’s one of my top one-percent students I’ve ever taught in research, without question.”

VV

BY CARL KOTALA

Lavanya Natarajan has been doing science fair projects since she was in the third grade.

Now, the Viera High senior has created a device that could help save the environment.

Natarajan’s project, titled “A Prescriptive IoT Solution To Detect and Mitigate Fugitive Methane Gas in Landfills via a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System,” has been placed among the top 40 projects in the country among high school seniors in the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2023 competition.

This month, she’ll find out if she made the top 10.

“Normally, I feel like we tend to only attribute global warming to just fossil fuel burning and a lot of times we tend to dismiss issues that we can’t see,” Natarajan said. “One of these issues is methane which comes from landfills.

“A large portion of these methane emissions actually escape from landfills and they fuel climate change. What I did was develop an IoT system to measure, manage, predict and mitigate these methane emissions and other landfill metrics in real time.”

The device, which took two to three months to build, senses landfill gas metrics including methane and CO2, along with other factors such as the temperature, pressure, altitude and humidity.

That information goes to an Arduino microcontroller that stores the data and can wirelessly send everything to a dashboard Natarajan created that can be accessed anywhere.

“I feel if the landfill engineers can use my device, they can use a lot of preemptive decisions on how to be able to capture all of the methane without it being released and without it escaping into the atmosphere,” Natarajan said.

“By capturing the methane, we can actually use it for power. And overall, I feel like this can help the greenhouse gas effect and it can also reduce the overall temperature by 1.5°C by 2030, which is something they’re doing in the Paris Environmental Agreement.”

Elizabeth Youngs, Viera High’s Science Department chair and a science research teacher, described Natarajan as an excellent student who might appear shy at first.

“Once she gets to talking about her project, her research — everything that she’s accomplished — you see a totally different person,” Youngs said. “You see a person who exudes her knowledge and is so glad to share it.

“She also can talk to the judges at their level of understanding as well as grandma who walks up to her projects and says, ‘Hey, what did you do?’ She has that ability to flip from the high-cognitive talker to somebody who can put it in layman’s terms.”

Natarajan’s interest in studying methane emissions at landfills came at an early age.

“I remember when I was in third or fourth grade, I went on a landfill tour,” she said. “The landfill engineers there told me about a lot of the problems that they’re facing. They’re actually really good mentors. I’m still in contact with them. I actually went (last month) to talk to them about my device and do some field testing.

“They give me a lot of advice and tips on how I can develop my research.”

As the project has evolved, Natarajan has gone from not using any technology to using it where it is not normally employed. And talk about dedication … when the COVID pandemic hit and she wasn’t able to physically go to a landfill, she made a mini-landfill in her garage to continue working on her research.

Natarajan first heard about the Regeneron Science Talent Search competition when she was a freshman at Viera and always wanted to enter the event, which is only open to high school seniors.

There were 1,949 entrants this year from 627 high schools across 48 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and four other countries. In January, Natarajan was informed she made the top 300.

“I was so happy and I was so excited to be a part of such a great group of other kids that also did super good projects,” she said.

“A week after that, I got the top 40. I couldn’t believe it at all. I’m super thankful.”

The next round of competition will take place this month in Washington D.C. Each finalist is awarded at least $25,000, and the top 10 awards range from $40,000 to the top prize of $250,000.

Natarajan has not decided on which college she will attend in the fall, but plans to

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Brevard Public Schools held a ground-breaking ceremony

Wednesday, Feb. 1 for the new, yet-to-be-named Viera Middle School