A 17-year-old Northborough inventor was invited to exhibit her smartphone app at the Obama Administration’s sixth and final White House Science Fair.
The White House on Wednesday welcomed about 130 top science, technology, engineering, and math students from around the country, which coincided with the 273rd birthday of American founding father and serial inventor Thomas Jefferson.
Yashaswini Makaram attends the Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science, a small public engineering high school partnered with the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She invented a smartphone security tool that verifies the identity of users based on how they pick up their phone.
Based on the idea that when people grab for their smartphone they automatically do it a certain way, Makaram’s smartphone app uses the phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope to determine how you pick up your phone. Her biometric Android app can successfully identify a cellphone’s owner 85 percent of the time that way.
Makaram began work on her project as a tenth grader. She is now a senior. An accomplished flutist, mathlete, tutor, singer, and mock-trial participant, Makaram will attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall.
Makaram’s project adviser Angela Taricco, a teacher at the Worcester academy, said the young inventor is her school’s first student to attend the fair.
Last year, two high-school students from Cambridge presented their 3D-printed wheelchair parts at the White House Science Fair.
Makaram’s app was one of more than 30 student projects chosen for exhibition this year.
“To have her recognized at the White House Science Fair, it’s amazing,’’ said Michael Barney, director of the Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science. “It’s so gratifying for us as a school to have good things happen to good students, to have their hard work, their curiosity, recognized.’’
Among the other projects: a 15-year old Florida teen developed a method for generating energy from ocean currents and a 17-year-old from Connecticut found a way to use silk to create an inexpensive and durable diagnostic test for the Ebola virus.
The Obama Administration held its first White House Science Fair in 2010 as part of its “Educate to Innovate’’ initiative to prepare America’s youth for careers in STEM. As of 2013, the initiative handed out $700 million in public-private partnerships to advance its mission of preparing 100,000 STEM teachers by 2021.
“I hope that every company and every college and every community and every parent and every teacher joins us in encouraging the next generation of students to actively engage and pursue science,’’ the president said in a live-streamed speech at the fair. “Science is not something that’s out of reach, it’s not just for the few, it’s for the many.’’
Amanda Burke can be reached at amanda.burke@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @charlie_acb.
