Gallery: A Scouting Guide to the Top High School Inventors

Daniel Asturias

Invention: Industrial-Strength Geothermal Generator

Quadrilingual by age three, Daniel Asturias showed his innovative spark early on. He set up contraptions around the house and pursued unusual hobbies like building chain-mail armor and pruning bonsai trees. He’s also self-taught in differential equations, theoretical physics and thermoacoustics. This year, Asturias and his teammate Isaac Harwell designed an underwater geothermal complex for geyser-like heat vents. The prospective system would have 150 generators placed over the vents, and each one could produce at least 45 megawatts of energy, adding up to some 6.8 gigawatts— or as much energy as three nuclear power plants. Little work has been done using these ocean vents because they sit on fault lines miles below the surface, making them expensive to access. Asturias’s design has no moving parts and requires little maintenance, which would eliminate repair trips. The project won first place and $10,000 at this year’s prestigious Pete Conrad Spirit of Innovation high-school invention competition.

GPA: 3.9; weighted 4.45
SAT Score: 2200 (out of 2400)
Patents: One pending
College: He’s been offered full tuition to the University of Texas.

Philip Streich

Invention: Solvent to Isolate Carbon Nanotubes

Carbon nanotubes are one hundred thousandths the thickness of a strand of hair, stronger than steel, and could potentially be used to build things like an elevator into space and bulletproof clothing. The problem is that nanotubes tend to clump together in tightly wound bundles, which zaps their strength and conductivity. For years, scientists assumed that the bundles were impossible to dissolve using a liquid solution, so they relied on a tedious chemical technique to only partially untangle them. That is, until Philip Streich, an 18-year-old farm boy, came up with a better way. He invented his own proprietary solvent mixture and watched the clumps quickly untangle. Now, three years later, Streich has five pending patents in nanoscience, which have won him countless science contests, not to mention more than $200,000 in prizes and scholarship money. When he’s not putting in 60-hour workweeks at a lab at the University of Wisconsin or managing his start-up nanotech company Graphene Solutions, he’s working on the farm, where his family raises sheep, chickens and cows.

GPA: Homeschooled
SAT Score: 2400
Patents: Five pending
College: He’ll enter Harvard University as an undergraduate, although he’s already taken enough college courses for a few bachelor of science degrees.