Miles Wu
Won the 2025 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge top prize (Thermo Fisher Scientific ASCEND Award, $25,000) at age 14 — announced by Society for Science (Oct 28, 2025).
What they built
Miles Wu engineered a series of origami-inspired foldable structures based on the Miura-ori fold to address the need for strong, lightweight, rapidly deployable disaster relief shelters. Starting at age 13–14, he self-taught origami for seven years before designing and testing 54 variations over 108 trials, discovering that smaller panels and steeper angles yield structures capable of supporting more than 10,000 times their own weight. His research demonstrates that the pattern is both scale-independent and material-independent, making it a promising blueprint for low-cost emergency housing that can be packed flat and deployed instantly in disaster zones worldwide. The project won him the $25,000 ASCEND Award at the 2025 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge.
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