When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, Neha Shukla was just 15 years old. For many teenagers, the lockdowns and other restrictions brought on many challenges, but for Shukla, they brought an opportunity to hone her creative vision and kick-start her career as an inventor.
Growing up in the small, aptly named town of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Shukla had carefree early childhood in a tight-knit community, with a home environment that fostered curiosity, self-directed learning and play. Encouraged by her parents and teachers to follow her passions, Shukla was keen to see her ideas brought to life, and entered all kinds of inventions in local science fairs.
When her school was shut down due to COVID, “were all scrambling to figure things out virtually”, says Shukla. She remembers sitting in what she likes to call her “bedroom lab”, watching ambulances circling the cul-de-sac outside her window. “At that point, I wanted to do something to help,” she says.
Shukla wasn’t short on ideas, but she – like most 15-year-olds – didn’t have much experience working with or developing technology. So, she turned to the internet for help, Googling questions such as, “What is a microprocessor?” and “How can I build hardware?”
Far from disrupting her education, the lockdowns opened up a world of online learning for Neha. “There is so much opportunity available online, whether it’s reading the ‘For Dummies’ series of books, watching YouTube videos, reading research papers available online for free, or watching talks from the best universities,” she says.
“What I love about it is that it transcends geographic and socioeconomic barriers, and gives everybody that opportunity, if they have internet access and a computer.”
From ideas to impact
Shukla had also signed up for a virtual programme called Girls With Impact run by a not-for-profit organisation and described as a ‘mini-MBA’ for girls. Invention was a key part of the course. She also completed two coding camps for girls, Kode with Klossy and Girls who Code.
Within just a few months, Shukla had developed her first invention – a high-tech hat called SixFeetApart. The wearable device beeps and buzzes when someone comes closer than 6 feet (1.8 metres), to help users observe safe social-distancing practices.
Before long – in a world desperate for solutions and good news stories – Shukla and her invention had gone viral. By the American summer of 2020, Shukla’s face had been broadcast in Times Square, New York City and she had been lauded in media across the world, including the New York Times and Harper’s Bazaar.
“That opened all of these doors for me,” says Shukla. “That’s when I saw the power of inventing and innovation.”
SixFeetApart was, in Shukla’s own words, a pretty simple invention – she was 15 years old, after all. But the device, designed to prevent contagion, certainly gave her the inventing bug. She completed her next invention in 2021: the PA Homeless Guide App, designed to be an “all-in-one” solution to combat homelessness in her home state. For example, it uses geolocation to connect volunteers to shelters, and provides a platform for advocating policy change.
In 2022, Shukla was invited to present the app to Apple CEO, Tim Cook and Kode with Klossy CEO, Karlie Kloss, at Apple’s headquarters in Soho, New York. She describes this as “another moment where companies and people in positions of power were amplifying my voice as a young inventor and truly believing in me”. Shukla is currently working on further developing, scaling and implementing the app across Pennsylvania.
The power of STEM for social good
Shukla’s experiences as a young innovator, and the support she’s received from people and organisations, has inspired her to engage in her own outreach. She decided to launch her own innovation workshops for school students, giving them a step-by-step process for solving problems in their communities using STEM skills and innovation.
The workshops started off in her hometown, but soon expanded virtually across the globe, as Shukla partnered with schools and grassroots organisations in India, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana. “The power of support and mentorship can be so transformative, and I want to be that for somebody else,” says Shukla, whose workshops have already reached more than 70,000 students from around the world.
Between inventing transformative technologies and running virtual innovation workshops, Shukla also managed to find time to complete a 2022 summer internship at NASA – both virtually and in Austin, Texas. She worked alongside NASA engineers and scientists who were devising a new kind of Earth-orbiting satellite equipped with tech to monitor environmentally vulnerable areas and alert officials to disasters like oil spills and wildfires. Neha later joined the team presenting the research at a conference in Chicago.
“It was such an amazing experience and, for me, the opportunity to combine the two areas that I love most: technology and social impact,” she says.
Social impact has always been Shukla’s ‘why’ for the work she’s done. She’s keen to see empathy and real-world problem-solving put at the centre of how the media and educators frame STEM, and she believes it is an approach that will help foster a more diverse and inclusive tech sector in the future.
She’s even written a book on the topic (seriously): Innovation for Everyone: Solving Real-World Problems with STEM, published in 2022. Within a week of its release, the book became a number-one best-seller on Amazon. It contains wisdom from a whole host of inventive minds interviewed by Shukla, including scientists, CEOs, community organisers and content creators – “all of these people who really are on the ground working to make the world a better place, using technology”, she says.
Navigating the new frontiers of AI
Shukla hopes that more people will see technology the way she does – as a powerful tool, not just a toy. This is especially true as we enter a new era of artificial intelligence (AI), she says. It’s fitting, then, that Shukla was recently appointed the United States representative of the World Economic Forum’s Generation AI Youth Council, a role that “advocates for ethical and child-safe AI”, she says. “It’s super important to consider the ethical consequences of what we’re creating.”
This year, Shukla was also awarded a US$10,000 ‘Flipping the Status Quo’ grant by M&M’s (the chocolate company) to support her student workshops, and her face made it back onto the Times Square billboard.
All of this, in the space of three years, since she first heard sirens wailing outside her bedroom window at the dawn of the pandemic, and decided to ask Google how to code.
Today, Shukla is 18 years old, and has only just finished high school. She’s enrolled at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina to study computer science with a focus on AI and machine learning, and says she will minor in either economics or public policy. She’ll graduate in 2027, which for most people would be when their career begins. It’ll be fascinating to see just what Shukla will have achieved by then.
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Story by Gemma Chilton
– Image credits Harpers Bazaar, shot by Maya Skelton
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