A 17-year-old student from Plano, Texas, has built an artificial intelligence tool to track air pollution in vulnerable neighborhoods, winning a national award and $10,000 for his work. His work earned him the 2026 Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes, an annual award given to 25 outstanding young leaders across the United States and Canada. Nathan Tan started the non-profit group Shared Skies Initiative to fight environmental inequality across Dallas, where poorer communities and minority families often breathe dirtier air but lack local pollution monitors.
Despite the health risks, only one official monitoring station covered an area of more than 900 square miles, leaving whole neighborhoods without reliable air data. Today, around 1,000 Texas residents use his live online map to check local air quality in real time. The teenager suffers from a respiratory illness and has lost family members to lung cancer.
Tan was inspired to act by his own health struggles and local volunteering, according to North Texas E-News. “Research only makes a difference when it reaches the people it is about,” Tan said. “A paper in a journal won’t protect a child from polluted air as he walks to school, but a bilingual booklet a mother can read will.”
a student asked him why the air outside looked so hazy While tutoring primary school children in West Dallas. When Tan looked into the issue, he found that children in West Dallas suffer from asthma at rates several times higher than the Texas state average. Buying and installing physical air sensors across every street was far too expensive. To solve this, Tan created a computer program that uses machine learning to predict pollution levels in areas without physical monitors, using existing physical sensors to check the calculations. Tan believes scientific research should help people directly in their daily lives.