Penn State Freshman, Downingtown STEM Grad a Modern-Day Renaissance Man

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Photo of Pranav Ranganathan courtesy of Pat Little.

downingtownstemThe world is just waiting for solutions, and Downingtown STEM Academy graduate Pranav Ranganathan can’t help but pursue them.

According to a Penn State news article by Jeff Rice, the new freshman and Schreyer Scholar at PSU has:

  • co-founded a Downingtown STEM club that “paired high school students with sixth-graders struggling in math”
  • produced promotional videos for an Indian charitable trust
  • engineered a process to turn everyday plastics into 3D printer filament
  • approached the brink of filing a patent for a car console tissue holder
  • reimagined the common drinking fountain

“We put everything in SolidWorks,” Ranganathan said of the filament project. “Where we hit a dead end was the funding part of it. Finding angel investors is pretty hard to do.”

So is finding the money for a patent. But that hasn’t stopped Ranganathan and his friends from Downingtown STEM from exploring their ideas to the fullest. As for the water fountain, “half the water just goes down the drain and doesn’t do anything,” he said, “and I’m not sure why that hasn’t been changed. It seems super simple to fix, and no one’s really doing it.”

Maybe he’ll be the one to do it.

Read more of Ranganathan’s story on the Penn State website here, and check out previous VISTA Today coverage of the Downingtown STEM Academy here.

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