Chetan Yenigalla holds out his hands, claps, and a sound wave fluctuates between them.
“We hear countless numbers of (sound waves) every day through music, traffic and getting yelled at by our parents,” he says in a video submitted to the Breakthrough Junior Challenge.
In the two-minute video posted to YouTube, he goes on to explain the special powers of extra-fast sound waves, known as ultrasound.
“Humans can’t hear ultrasound,” he says, “But if we could it would shatter all of our organs and we wouldn’t hear anything ever again.”
The senior at Ravenwood High School in Brentwood is a semifinalist in the challenge, a contest run by the organization that gives out the Breakthrough Prize for major scientific advances. Now in its tenth year, the Junior Challenge invites teens from around the world to explain scientific concepts through energetic two-minute videos full of animation and other special effects.
Yenigalla learned about the competition from a friend who made the semifinal round a few years ago. It sounded perfect for him. He loves science and wants to be a surgeon specializing in the brain and spinal cord. He learned video editing in 2020, when the pandemic left everyone stuck at home. And he’s passionate about public speaking. He served as secretary general of Tennessee’s high school Model United Nations.
“About 900 students from every corner of the volunteer state (attend),” he told WPLN. “And getting to stand in front of all of them and talk about major policy issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, global renewable energy practices — all that was just really interesting.”
When it came time to choose a topic for his Breakthrough Junior Challenge video, Yenigalla took a risk. Some of the competition’s previous winners covered science’s greatest hits, like relativity or how blue light affects sleep. But he chose a relatively new field of medicine that most people haven’t heard of: sonogenetics.
“Essentially (it) involves ultrasonic waves used to stimulate the brain, the heart, parts of the body to treat diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and cancer,” he said.
Teaching this topic in a two-minute video took some ingenuity, like using visual aids as metaphors for complex human biology.
“I did stuff like throwing a football to explain cell reception,” he said.
And he had to address a controversy around sonogenetics: It would require modifying people’s genes.
“This angers many groups because of the high chance of causing accidental mutations,” he says in the video. “On the other hand, some groups argue that sonogenetics can treat devastating neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s by ultrasonically stimulating (cells) without surgery.”
Once he submitted the video, it was critiqued and scored by other contestants in a process similar to a scientific peer review.
“Your peers have to rate it on a few standards like creativity and comprehensibility,” Yenigalla said. “That was definitely the most stressful part because the peer review narrows it down from the 2-to-3000 initial submissions to 75 people.”
But his peers elevated him to the top 75, and he advanced again to the top 30 semifinalists. The finalists will be decided by popular vote, with very high stakes.
“$250,000 in scholarship for the winner,” Yenigalla said. “$50,000 in a cash prize for a nominated science teacher who motivated the student to make the video, and $100,000 for the winner’s school to build a new science lab.”
Anyone can vote by liking the video on YouTube, or on the Breakthrough Prize’s Facebook page. Each like on either platform counts as one vote. Voting closes this Friday, September 20th.
But however the competition turns out, Yenigalla says he’s working towards a degree in medicine, and wants to do more science communication in the future.
“Sharing my ideas is what genuinely makes me happy and holding conversations with other people about those ideas just so I can understand new perspectives is something that I want to hold on to as long as I can,” he said.
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