High school seniors missed out on so much in 2023—no proms, no traditional graduation ceremonies. But that has not stopped some of them trying to solve the world's biggest challenges. And Lillian Kay Petersen from Los Alamos, New Mexico, is among them.
Petersen invented a simple tool for predicting harvests early in the growing season, which could facilitate food allocation(分配) planning and offer useful resources to those working to tackle global food insecurity. She first tested her tool, which analyzed daily satellite imagery using accepted measures of vegetation health, on known domestic crop data. She then carried out experiments for countries in Africa and successfully predicted harvests with high accuracy against reported production.
Petersen won first place and the $250,000 top award in the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2023, one of the oldest and most reputable science and math competitions for high school seniors in the US.
In 2014, Petersen's family adopted her three younger brothers and sisters, all of whom suffered from malnutrition(营养不良) due to food insecurity in their childhood. Their struggles against the lifelong effects left a deep impression on her. After reading about a disastrous drought in Ethiopia between 2018 and 2019, she put her computer science knowledge to use. "I wanted to find a way to help aid organizations monitor crop condition as droughts evolve, to help them respond to food crises with a better time, and to help children so that they don't face malnutrition and lifelong consequences," she said.
While in high school, she began monitoring droughts in Africa using satellite imagery. Later, she published her first paper on the subject in a peer-reviewed journal. She has also met with the International Food Policy Research Institute to discuss the global pandemic (流行病)and its effects on crop production in Africa.
