Pranav was a global finalist in the Google Science Fair twice.
By Sreejith Vallikunnu
US president Barack Obama has lauded Indian American astronomy enthusiast Pranav Sivakumar during a White house Astronomy Night organized by Obama on Monday.
Sivakumar recently made history by becoming the first person to earn a second Global Finalist award in the 2015 Google Science Fair.
“When Pranav Sivakumar was six years old, he found an encyclopedia about famous scientists lying around the house. At least he thinks it was lying around there. Actually, his parents probably were setting it out hoping he was going to run into it,” PTI quoted Obama as saying.
“And he’s been fascinated with outer space ever since. For years, every Saturday morning, his parents drove him an hour to an astrophysics lab for ‘Ask-A-Scientist’ class. And before long, he teamed up with researchers he met there to study the ‘gravitational lensing of quasars’. That is not what I was thinking about at his age,” the US President said.
“Pranav was a global finalist in the Google Science Fair – not once, but twice. So you know he’s going to do some important things. Give him a big round of applause,” he added.
An eighth grader at the Illinois Math and Science Academy in Aurora, Illinois, Sivakumar is one of the 20 teens from across the world to be named a finalist in Google’s online science and technology competition.
He received the Virgin Galactic Pioneer Award last month for researching objects called quasars that appear unusually bright in the night sky. He was the runner up in the 2013 National Spelling Bee, is working to find galaxies dominated by dark matter with a professor at the University of Chicago.
“It has been an exciting journey, I plan to continue this research for many years, hoping to contribute at least a little to our understanding of dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95 per cent of the universe and determine its future,” Sivakumar responded in a press release after the function.