The Davidson Fellows Scholarship Program has announced the 2022 scholarship winners. Among the honorees are Arjun Barrett, 16, of Santa Clara, Elane Kim, 17, of Walnut Creek, and Indeever Madireddy, 17, of San Jose. Only 21 students across the country are recognized as 2022 scholarship winners.

“Being a Davidson Fellow means more to me than a scholarship and a prestigious title,” said Barrett. “It’s validation that my work has meaningfully contributed to society, and as someone who dreams of making the world a better place, that is an honor I treasure beyond any award.”

Barrett’s project, FFlate: A universal high-performance compression library optimized for web browsers, developed a JavaScript software library, called FFlate, that is the fastest and smallest compression library available in web browsers. His software has been downloaded more than 60 million times and is currently used by several hospitals to reduce the time and bandwidth required to access medical files. Barrett is a rising senior at the Harker School in San Jose.

Kim’s project, Aftermath: The Orality of Storytelling, is a portfolio of creative writing that acts in conversation with historical Korean folklore to highlight the voices of modern Asian and Asian American stories during a time of instability, serving ultimately to defy marginalization through memorialization.  Kim is a rising senior at Stanford Online High School.

Madireddy’s project, Stably Integrating CRISPR-Cas9 to Augment the Mammalian Immune System to Protect Against Viral Infections, found that bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 system, which protects bacteria from viral infections, could be repurposed to function as an inducible intracellular defense mechanism that protects human cells from viral infections. Madireddy is a rising senior at BASIS Independent Silicon Valley in San Jose.

“This year’s class of Davidson Fellows Scholarship recipients continue to find new and innovative ways to pursue their educational and research journeys while striving to solve some of the world’s most vexing problems,” said Bob Davidson, founder of the Davidson Institute. “These students have not just overcome the challenges of doing significant work during a pandemic; our Fellows have embraced the new opportunities that have come from creative, outside-the-box thinking to use technology to expand their networks of mentors and access new sources of information and data, resulting in a very diverse portfolio of projects.”

The 2022 Davidson Fellows will be honored during a reception at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and with a virtual project presentation ceremony in September 2022.

The Davidson Fellows Scholarship program offers $50,000, $25,000 and $10,000 college scholarships to students 18 or younger, who have completed significant projects that have the potential to benefit society in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, literature and music. The Davidson Fellows Scholarship has provided more than $9 million in scholarship funds to 407 students since its inception in 2001, and has been named one of the most prestigious undergraduate scholarships by U.S. News & World Report. It is a program of the Davidson Institute, a national nonprofit organization headquartered in Reno, Nev. that supports profoundly gifted youth. 

About the Davidson Institute
About the Davidson Institute Founded by Bob Davidson in 1999, the Davidson Institute recognizes, nurtures and supports profoundly intelligent young people, and provides opportunities for them to develop their talents to make a positive difference. The Institute offers support through a number of programs and services, including the Davidson Fellows Scholarship and the Davidson Academy of Nevada. For more information about the 2022 Davidson Fellows, please visit: DavidsonFellows.org.