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Harvard bestows top honours on local teen

Maya Burhanpurkar one of 12 outstanding women in national Women in STEM calendar and receives Harvard's top academic honour
maya
Maya Burhanpurkar, of Oro-Medonte, received Harvard's top academic honour and is one of just 12 women featured in the national Women in STEM calendar. Submitted photo

NEWS RELEASE
WOMEN IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING AND MATH
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To Inspire young women to pursue their interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

Local teen Maya Burhanpurkar was recently chosen as one of 12 outstanding women featured in the inaugural edition of the national Women in Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) 2019 calendar.

The 19-year-old from Oro-Medonte Township has also received Harvard’s top academic honour, the prestigious John Harvard award and Detur book prize, for her 4.0 freshman year grade point average.

Burhanpurkar, a graduate of Barrie North Collegiate, is currently part of a team researching quantum topological phase transitions for achieving room temperature superconductivity, under the Dean of Physics at Harvard.

On top of that, she is faithfully attending classes while writing a ground-breaking paper with Breakthrough Prize winner Kendrick Smith at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo developing a new technique to create the world’s first pulsar map of the universe, which will be needed to guide future deep space probes.

The teen, a two-time winner of the Grand Platinum Prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair, was also featured on the front page of the Harvard Gazette for her earlier research at the Perimeter Institute on rapid detection of cosmic Fast Radio Bursts using CHIME, the world’s most powerful radio telescope.  She developed the world's fastest pseudo random number generator.

“I like making things that go incredibly fast,” said Burhanpurkar. “You could say I have a need for speed."

She is currently pursuing a double major in physics and computer science with a focus on quantum computing and quantum condensed matter physics.

"Quantum processes are the fastest things in the universe,” said Burhanpurkar, who was named one of Plan Canada’s Top 20 Under 20 and was one of Canada’s Top 10 EdTech Newsmakers of 2014. “They can happen instantaneously across infinite spans of space-time through quantum entanglement.”

The 2019 Women in STEM calendar is available at your local RBC, CIBC, and BMO while limited quantities last.

The Calendar showcases 12 young women in different and exciting careers.

There are many roads one can go down with a career in STEM, so we wanted to highlight the unique paths each of these women have taken to where they are today. Find out what they did with their STEM education!

ABOUT STEM:
The See It Be It STEM It initiative seeks to empower young girls to pursue their interest in STEM, to allow them to reach their full potential.

In a world of rapidly evolving technology, there is an increasing demand for STEM graduates. They are also the key to solving some of the planet’s biggest issues. We need young minds in STEM to provide innovative solutions to our problems. To ensure we solve these problems, we need to tap into 100% of the population. See It Be It STEM It aims to do this by:

Identifying & Empowering Women in STEM

Young girls have limited access to role models. The University of Toronto, for example, boasts 42% women in its 2017-18 freshman engineering class. Despite statistics like this, the common misconception is that there are not many women in STEM. The See It Be It STEM It Calendar and Role Models identify incredible young women who have a STEM education, and highlights their stories to empower both current and future women in STEM.

More information can be found at https://www.seeitbeitstemit.com/meet-maya ***********************