Draft:Shanya Gill

• Comment: Most references are from the Society for Science's own website, which is connected to the competition that gave her the award, and regional interest pieces. The Washington Post and TIME pieces are the strongest sources here. If those articles discuss her work in depth rather than as brief mentions, please make that clearer in the draft and resubmit. Flyingphoenixchips (talk) 02:43, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

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Shanya Gill
Born	San Jose, California, U.S.
Occupations	Inventor, entrepreneur
Known for	Thermal imaging fire-detection device; founder of Vigil Inc.
Awards	Thermo Fisher Scientific ASCEND Award ($25,000), 2023; TIME Kid of the Year Honoree, 2024

Shanya Gill is an Indian-American inventor and entrepreneur from San Jose, California. As a student at Miller Middle School, she built a thermal imaging device to detect unattended kitchen heat sources before they cause a fire, winning the $25,000 ASCEND Award at the 2023 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge. The Washington Post covered her work in depth in November 2023. In August 2024, TIME magazine named her one of its Kid of the Year Honorees, publishing a full profile of her invention and her outreach to fire-affected communities. In October 2025, Entrepreneur published a feature on her founding of Vigil Inc., an AI-powered home security company she built using her competition winnings.

Background

Gill grew up in San Jose and attended Miller Middle School. She developed an interest in coding at a young age and participated in science fairs throughout middle school. She later enrolled at Lynwood High School in San Jose.

Fire-detection device

Origins

Gill's work on the device began after a restaurant behind her home burned down in the summer of 2022. As she later told Entrepreneur, the restaurant had working smoke detectors but they failed to prevent the fire, which she attributed to smoke detectors being too slow to respond. The Washington Post reported she spent over a year developing a prototype, teaching herself to code in the process. According to National Fire Protection Association figures cited by TIME, home fires account for roughly a quarter of the approximately 1.5 million fires reported annually in the United States and cause more than 2,700 deaths per year. Unattended cooking is the leading cause, responsible for about a third of incidents. Her approach shifted after she discovered that thermal cameras were used industrially to detect heat loss in building walls, which led her to consider whether the same technology could identify a lit burner before smoke or flames appeared.

Design and testing

The device pairs a low-cost thermal camera with a Raspberry Pi single-board computer. Gill wrote code to distinguish between two categories of heat: moving warmth from people or animals, and a stationary source such as a burner left on. When the camera detects an active heat source with no person in frame for ten minutes, it sends an automated text alert to the user. She tested the device by mounting it on a kitchen wall and running trials at different times of day. In those trials, it identified a person in frame 98 percent of the time, detected an active heat source 97 percent of the time, and sent an alert when a source was left unattended 97 percent of the time. She published the code on GitHub and did not file a patent, telling TIME she believed sole ownership would limit how widely the technology could spread. A later version explored a ceiling-mounted design similar to a standard smoke detector, which would allow the device to draw power from existing wiring and cover a wider area.

Junior Innovators Challenge

The Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge is a yearly STEM competition for students in grades six through eight, organized by the Society for Science. About 65,000 students entered the 2023 edition. Thirty finalists traveled to Washington, D.C. for Finals Week, which included individual project judging and team challenges. Gill received the ASCEND Award, standing for Aspiring Scientists Cultivating Exciting New Discoveries, the competition's top honor and a $25,000 prize. TIME quoted Maya Ajmera, President and CEO of the Society for Science, who said the project stood out for using engineering to address a genuine safety problem, and noted the work Gill did connecting with fire-affected communities after the competition ended.

Vigil Inc.

After winning the competition, Gill used her prize money to develop the technology into a commercial product. Entrepreneur reported that she founded Vigil Inc. in 2025 and was targeting mass production by the end of that year. She relied heavily on AI coding tools during development, including ChatGPT and Cursor, telling Entrepreneur: "AI really helped me through that process. Without [it giving] me very customized answers, I don't think I would have been able to make Vigil." The Vigil device uses both standard and thermal cameras to send real-time alerts and can be configured to monitor for a range of events beyond fire safety, such as notifying a user when a child arrives home. Entrepreneur also reported that Gill received funding from Amazon and Google, which she uses for AWS and Google Cloud infrastructure. Fierce Sensors, a trade publication covering sensor technology, independently profiled Gill in May 2026, reporting that she appeared on the main stage at Sensors Converge 2026 in Santa Clara, California.

Recognition

In March 2024, Gill visited the U.S. Fire Administration's national headquarters and met with Administrator Lori Moore-Merrell. TIME reported that the agency expressed interest in helping fund a wider launch of the device. In August 2024, TIME named her one of five Kid of the Year Honorees, alongside Dom Pecora, Madhvi Chittoor, Jordan Sucato, and Keivonn Woodard. She also appeared as a guest on The Drew Barrymore Show. Her work has been covered by The Washington Post, TIME, Entrepreneur, Fox News, Fierce Sensors, Girls' Life, and Green Matters, among other outlets.