The nation’s oldest and most prestigious STEM competition for high school seniors just awarded more than $1.8 million to ten finalists who exhibited exceptional problem-solving abilities and scientific leadership.

For the first time in its 78-year history, the Regeneron Science Talent Search competition (formerly the Westinghouse Science Talent Search) took place virtually, but that didn’t quell the excitement as the top winners were announced—and Lillian Kay Petersen of Los Alamos, New Mexico won a quarter million dollars.

The 17-year-old invented a simple tool for predicting harvests early in the growing season, which helps to improve food distribution planning and offers a promising resource to aid groups working on global food insecurity.

Lillian first validated her tool, which analyzes daily satellite imagery using accepted measures of vegetation health, on known domestic crop data. She then tested it for countries in Africa and successfully predicted harvests with terrific accuracy when compared with reported yields.

She was motivated to do research in this field after her parents adopted children who faced food insecurity and, later, she read about Ethiopia where a famine had affected millions of people leading to developmental learning problems in children.