“I realized how big the problem was and how closely connected I was to it,” said the Bayview Secondary School student in Ontario, Canada.

In response, Shanzeh is developing BeBella, a postpartum app designed to help new moms to navigate their postpartum journeys. 

New mothers can track their postpartum health, such as water intake and sleep patterns, and can use artificial intelligence to create a personalized care plan.

Moms can also journal how they’re feeling.

Shanzeh said the data, with its AI component, can streamline and coordinate their health care journeys with their doctors. She added that postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis affects hundreds of millions of mothers worldwide.

“And because of that” she said, “I know that the app does have a lot of potential to impact and transform these people’s lives.”

Her project, Rubix, inspired by the Rubik’s Cube and Lego, is a tiny prefabricated home complete with a kitchen, a bathroom and other necessities.

 “It’s intended for independent living with dignity for the homeless population,” Wang said.

Rubix is entirely off-grid, powered by solar energy, and uses bamboo and recycled plastics as its main construction materials.

Unlike any of the other tiny home products that are available on the market, Wang said, “it’s an innovative design that makes manufacturing, transportation and installation cheaper, faster and far more efficient.”

Rubix has an independent plumbing system, so it can also be used in natural disaster relief. 

Wang has been communicating with city council members and nonprofits that are interested in seeing Rubix being implemented in San Diego.

She is also fundraising to create a full-scale prototype. Wang says she’s aiming for a one-time purchase cost of $30,000, compared to the $50,000 per year San Diego shelter beds cost to maintain.

For her work on Rubix, Wang , a nonprofit that provides opportunities for accomplished young people to make a positive difference.

But do you remember what pi actually stands for? What the number represents? 

And have you ever heard of #DressforSTEM Day, which is also March 14? 

No? Here’s fourth-grader Ada with everything you need to know: 

Ada knows what Pi is, but how many adults do? The 74’s Jim Fields asked the people of Philadelphia — and the results are hilarious:

STEM Superstars: In honor of Pi Day, here are five inspiring teens creating STEM breakthroughs: 

And in celebration of Women’s History Month, The 74’s Trinity Alicia explores women’s ongoing impact in STEM and how a hashtag is driving the Pi Day conversation to representation of women in the field:

In honor of 3.14, we recently canvassed the country, searching out STEM students with noteworthy projects and inventions. You can see all our recent profiles on our STEM Superstars microsite; here are our most recent video profiles of four remarkable teenagers: 

Helping Amputees — Virginia’s Arav Bhargava

The 18-year-old senior at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia has developed a universal fit, 3D-printed prosthetic for amputees missing their forearms. (Read the full story) 

Confronting Depression & Suicide — New York’s Natasha Kulviwat

The 17-year-old from Jericho researched a biomarker to help identify those at risk of suicide. (Read the full story) 

Easing Anxiety — Philadelphia’s Gavriela Beatrice Kalish-Schur

The 18-year-old senior at Pennsylvania’s Julia R. Masterman High School gave fruit flies anxiety to gain a deeper understanding for what makes us anxious — and to pave the path for better treatments. (Read the full story) 

Improving Rural Health Care — Maryland’s William Gao

The 18-year-old from Ellicott City’s Centennial High School created an AI-enabled diagnostic app that could help save rural cancer patients. (Read the full story) 

And in honor of March 14 and Women’s History Month, The 74’s Trinity Alicia explores women’s ongoing impact in STEM and how a hashtag is driving the Pi Day conversation to representation of women in the field:

Natasha Kulviwat, having been interested in neuroscience and mental health from an early age, noticed that neuroscience wasn’t making as much progress in mental health diagnoses and interventions as she thought it should.

So, the 17-year-old from Jericho High School in Jericho, New York embarked on a search for a biomarker related to suicide, wondering if there was a way to use neuroscience to identify those at risk.

Kulviwat looked at brain tissue for those who died by suicide and found there was an increase in a protein biomarker in suicide decedents. The biomarkers could also identify genetic vulnerabilities that could lead to suicidal ideation. 

So, for instance, pathologists could find spikes in the protein biomarkers and, along with a self-report questionnaire, could catalyze suicide prevention in the future.

“My research serves as a small puzzle piece that will hopefully advance the way we view diagnostics for suicide in the future,” Kulviwat said.

For William Gao, his research is personal. Three of his grandparents, who lived in rural China with sparse access to health care, were diagnosed with cancer. 

“Poor health care meant late diagnoses,” Gao said. “And late diagnoses meant grim prognoses.”

During his research, 18-year-old Gao noticed that shortages in pathologists around the world cause long diagnosis times, especially in developing countries. He said this elevates mortality rates in breast cancer patients, for example.

To tackle these health care disparities, the teen from Centennial High School in Ellicott City, Maryland, developed an AI diagnostic tool to support doctors and hospitals in the diagnosis process. Rather than sending tissue samples to a separate lab, with long wait times for results, Gao’s app creates a heat map, then and there, of a biopsied tissue revealing exactly what part of the tissue sample could be malignant.

Knowing where to look in a tissue sample could vastly speed up the diagnostic process, Gao said. And, not only that — the app ameliorates the risks associated with patient privacy, since it eliminates the process of transferring patient data between institutions.

Gao said that this is a noteworthy step towards offering more equitable health care outcomes, and he sees room to collaborate with the venture and entrepreneur space to scale the app. 

“I hope it can be applied in rural areas which can create a real impact and really have an ability to support patients around the world,” he said.

Gavriela Beatrice Kalish-Schur knew from an early age that STEM was for her. But it was in high school that she knew she wanted to specialize in neuroscience, “I think because we know so little about the brain,” she said.

She also knew that anxiety impacts many young people, and that current therapies aren’t as effective as they could be, or they’re very expensive — or both.

The 18-year-old senior at Julia R. Masterman High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, said she was interested in understanding what’s happening on a cellular level with anxiety to help inform the development of more effective treatments.

Her experiment: Make fruit flies anxious. She targeted a certain brain pathway called IRE1, knocking it down in the flies. “Knocking down is like turning down the volume when you’re listening to music,” she explained. 

Then she observed their behavior. And like the proverbial wallflower at a school dance, the fruit flies clung to the wall of the petri dish, rather than spread over the surface as they normally would. In other words, the flies exhibited anxious behavior.

Kalish-Schur discovered that these flies had different protein levels than the control group. Understanding the relationship between the IRE1 pathway and anxiety, she said, can lead to more targeted treatments for anxiety in humans. 

”We can use what we already know and new techniques to develop cures for diseases that harm a lot of people,” Kalish-Schur said.

Ever since he was an elementary schooler, David Lu Cao, now a high school senior, was always fascinated by the question, “How did life on Earth begin?” 

That’s when his father bought him a telescope for his birthday. Seeing the planets and distant objects “was a pivotal moment,” said Cao, an 18-year-old student at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia.

In 2017, astronomers discovered the first space rock, named ‘Oumuamua, originating from another solar system. 

“This mysterious asteroid or comet got me thinking about the possibility that similar objects may have spread life across our universe,” he said. In other words, could life on Earth have been started by these objects?

This process, called Panspermia, is one of the theories of the origins of life on Earth. It posits that single-celled organisms — or the building blocks of life — could survive for billions of years inside these objects and seed the earth with life.

Cao created a mathematical model, and used data about the quantity of these objects over a given period of time and space. 

He discovered that there’s a 0.001% chance of Panspermia being responsible for life on earth. 

“However, given that there are billions of habitable exoplanets in our galaxy alone….this number is actually not too small,” he said.

Cao hopes to one day work for NASA or other organizations like Space X “to take humanity to new heights,” he said.

Nearly 40 million people in the developing world need prosthetics, but only about 5% have access to them. Arav Bhargava, an 18-year-old senior at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia, said that there are two main reasons for this: First, that prosthetics are prohibitively expensive; Second, that there is a significant barrier to access to professionals for fitting and maintenance. 

“That really isn’t feasible in developing countries,” he said.

In response, Bhargava developed a universal fit, 3D-printed prosthetic for amputees missing their forearms in the form of a kit consisting of all necessary components. 

“Each amputee would be able to take a kit for themselves, and have a prosthetic for the rest of their lives,” he said.

The goal is to keep each kit under $40.

Bhargava plans to develop partnerships to further scale and distribute his kits for the roughly 40 million people in need.