TNJSF JEI Award Winner: Rhea Rawat

Rhea Rawat is an incoming sophomore at John P. Stevens High School and has been dedicated to researching solutions related to climate change since she was in middle school. Following forest fires in Greece and Hawaii, Rhea became motivated to detect forest fires while they were still small in order to contain them rapidly and mitigate their negative environmental impacts. While developing her research project, Rhea found that many of the current solutions had unique drawbacks and developed a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based solution to address these shortcomings. Her study, presented at TNJSF, demonstrated this WSN based system to be accurate and reliable. Moreover, Rhea’s WSN based system also uses harvested rainwater and smart water pumps, making this system completely autonomous.

Completing field testing under various conditions was challenging, but Rhea’s persistence and passion led to interesting scientific results with future implications in addressing forest fires. Reflecting on her experience at TNJSF, Rhea shared that she learned to speak confidently about her research and communicate her findings to individuals of different backgrounds. Rhea also enjoyed answering questions from her audience and has come to appreciate the importance of answering questions to improve other’s understanding and confidence in her work.

Congratulations to Rhea and her success at TNJSF! We can’t wait to see what she does next!

The material on this page was prepared by Hannah Thompson, JEI Managing Editor and Claire Otero, JEI co-Editor in Chief. Rhea Rawat provided the photo and answers to standard questions which were lightly edited for clarity.