Lawrenceville junior Nikhil Gopal earned the grand prize in this year’s annual Mercer Science and Engineering Fair held at Rider University. The award for the project, Point of Care Testing for Malaria Using a Smartphone and a Microfluidic ELISA Chip, allowed him to enter the Intel International Fair along with over 1600 finalist where his project took second place in his category. 

Nikhil is now one of 16 global finalists in the annual Google Science Fair, an online competition for students ages 13 to 18. Here is Nikhil’s explanation of his project:

“Malaria kills nearly 1 million people yearly, mostly in Africa and India. A simple and inexpensive way to track progression of the malaria parasite is needed. I created a portable system to detect malaria proteins using ELISA (enzyme linked immunosorbent assay). My system uses a smartphone and a microfluidic disc which uses centrifugal force instead of electricity to mix reagents. The microfluidic disc uses 1/100th the volume of a standard ELISA resulting in cheaper reagent costs. The system is designed for rural settings without access to expensive laboratory equipment and costs under $10 per sample.”

The award celebration for the Google Science Fair is September 27.