Our names are Diya Chandrasekaran, Pranathi Konduri, and Prisha Shah. We are currently seniors at Panther Creek High School passionate about research and advocacy. Our journey began two years ago, before we entered our sophomore year. One of us, Pranathi, had the experience of hearing first-hand from a person living in an agricultural community highly impacted by PFAS. After hearing about the heartbreaking effects on his neighbors and his farm animals, she told us his story. We were inspired by it and began looking into PFAS, motivating two years of research on the immunological impacts of PFAS, including biomarkers linking PFAS exposure with autoimmune disease development and potential methylation edits to reverse PFAS-induced epigenetic alterations.
At one of our competitions, we crossed paths with a judge whose work mentioned PFAS. We reached out to the judge later on and found that she was a member of the DEQ working on PFAS contamination. This started us on the path that led us to where we are today! With the guidance of our two mentors, Dr. Stephanie Zorio and Lauren Daniel, we have created educational materials that we hope will find more motivated students and inspire their own journeys of community-focused advocacy.
We have also composed and sent a policy brief advocating for expansion of North Carolina's current 2026 Water Safety Act to include state-funded testing for PFAS-impacted communities without access to testing, and created an infographic and graphs depicting the results of our research on PFAS in public drinking water systems. We hope our work will reach like-minded members of our community and help bring awareness to a critical environmental and political issue affecting our state.
Thank you for checking out our work! We would love to hear from you. Please feel free to reach out to us at:
Diya Chandrasekaran: diya.c2409@gmail.com
Pranathi Konduri: pranathi.konduri04@gmail.com
Prisha Shah: prisha1220@gmail.com
This site was created in October 2026.