This 17-year-old teenager has devised a way to purify water using sunlight

17-year-old Deepika Kurup is an inventor, scientist and clean water advocate, and has invented a device that harnesses solar power to disinfect water at a rate much better than technologies available. It is an invention that has the potential to provide clean water for people across the globe.

According to 1millionwomen, Deepika used her parents’ garage as a makeshift laboratory and invented a way for people crippled by poverty to access clean drinking water. She was inspired to act on the Global Water Crisis when during her summer trips to India she witnessed children drinking water that she had thought to be “too dirty to touch”. Considering that each year more people die from unsafe water than violence her invention is revolutionary. Clean water is a universal human right and the world is now a step closer to eradicating water injustice, thanks to Deepika Kurup.

Deepika’s device showed 98% reduction in total coliform bacteria immediately after filtration. Exposure of the filtered water to sunlight with a photocatalytic composite disc resulted in 100% inactivation of total coliform bacteria in just 15 minutes.

Her phenomenal work has won her the 2012 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Award. She was only 14 when she won the award. Since then she has worked further on her technology and has won the 2014, U.S. Stockholm Junior Water Prize with her project “A Novel Photocatalytic Pervious Composite for Degrading Organics and Inactivating Bacteria in Wastewater.” In January 2015, she was named as one of Forbes’ 2015 30 Under 30 in Energy. She also is the National Geographic winner in the 2015 Google Science Fair.