New Jersey Teen Abinaya Dinesh Wins Apple’s Swift Student Challenge
- The 15-year-old from North Brunswick, created an app called Gastro at Home, which offers people with gastrointestinal disorders a way to access information and resources.
New Jersey teen Abinaya Dinesh is one of the 350 winners of Apple’s Swift Student Challenge winners this year. The challenge is a part of Apple’s annual WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference), where kids showcase coding and problems by submitting an original Swift playground.
Dinesh, 15, of North Brunswick, created an app called Gastro at Home, which offers people with gastrointestinal disorders a way to access information and resources, especially because those types of conditions can sometimes be sensitive to talk about.
Dinesh, a rising junior at North Brunswick Township High School, plans to launch Gastro at Home on the App Store this summer. She is interested in learning about ethical artificial intelligence, environmental impacts on public health, and transformational technology for developing modern solutions.
Apple says Dinesh is “passionate about the intersection of medicine and technology — something that became personal for her last year.” She spoke to Apple about the genesis of Gastro at Home. “I went to a gastroenterologist and he diagnosed me with a pelvic floor disorder,” said Dinesh, “but then told me nothing about how I was supposed to get better.”
Over the last year, Dinesh has also started her own nonprofit, Impact AI, to foster learning and ethical practices in artificial intelligence among young people. As part of it, she launched an eight-week high school program, called Girls in AI, to teach young women the basics of programming and machine learning. She told Apple that she’s “super big” on teaching. “Showing the next generation that this technology exists and can lead to huge advancements in medicine and society is so important,” she said. “And I’m proud that after the program was over, there were seniors applying to college who told me this experience changed what their major was going to be.”
After graduating high school, Dinesh wants to attend either medical school or get a degree in computer science. “I think it’s important that we keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible,” said Dinesh, “because nobody is going to do it for us.”