Jerath, a scientist and innovator moved to the US at the age of 13.
Indians Trisha Shetty and Ankit Kawatra with Indian American Karan Jerath are among 17 people selected for the inaugural class of UN Young Leaders for Sustainable Development Goals for their leadership and contribution to end poverty, fight inequality and injustice, and tackle climate change by 2030.
19-year-old Indian American Karan Jerath invented a ground-breaking, subsea wellhead capping device that contains oil spills at the sources as a solution in the aftermath of the BP deepwater horizon oil spill – the largest marine oilspill in US history, near his home in Texas.
Jerath, a scientist and innovator, was born in India, raised in Malaysia and moved to the US at the age of 13. When the BP oil spill happened 30 minutes away from his home in Texas, Jerath says he was determined to take action.
While still in high school, he invented a device that contains oil spills at the source. The patent-pending device can collect oil, gas and water gushing from a broken well on the seafloor, providing an effective, temporary solution in the case of an unforeseen subsea oil spill.
For his invention, Jerath won the ‘Young Scientist Award’ at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair’s 2015 competition, and was selected as the youngest honoree on this year’s Forb’s 30 Under 30 Energy list.
The ‘SheSays’ founder Trisha Shetty, 25, launched her platform last year to educate, rehabilitate and empower women to take direct action against sexual assault in India.
According to a statement on the young leaders by the office of the UN Secretary-General’s envoy on Youth, Shetty and her team work with established institutions across the education, entertainment and healthcare sectors to build a network of support that recognizes all levels of sexual abuse and provides the necessary means to fight it.
So far, the organization has successfully engaged more than 60,000 young people through educational workshops and Shetty is now focused on achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of gender equality.
24-year-old Ankit Kawatra, who quit his corporate job at 22, founded ‘Feeding India’ in 2014 to address the issues of hunger and food waste, particularly by distributing excess food from weddings and parties to the needy.
‘Feeding India’ has a network of over 2,000 volunteers in 28 cities in India for rescuing and redistributing excess food to help feed people in need. The organization has served over one million meals to date and aims to reach 100 million by 2020.
The inaugural class, selected from over 18,000 nominations from 186 different countries, will support efforts to engage young people in the realization of the SDG’s and will have opportunities to engage in UN and partner-led projects.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the 17 young change-makers are a ‘testament to the ingenuity of youth and I congratulate them for their exceptional leadership and demonstrated commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals’.
Other leaders selected for the inaugural class are Anthony Ford-Shubrook from the UK, Kenya’s Rita Kimani, Shougat Nazbin Khan from Bangladesh and Tunisian-Iraqi writer Samar Samir Mezghanni.