Meet the teen who just won $75,000 for inventing a system to keep germs from spreading on airplanes

Canadian student Raymond Wang, 17, won the world’s largest high school science competition on Friday, taking home the top prize of $75,000 for inventing a new way to keep germs from spreading in airplane cabins.

“It’s very exciting. I absolutely did not expect it,” Wang said by telephone from Pittsburgh, host city for the finals of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. “It’s literally the happiest day of my life.”

Wang started thinking about the problem of disease transmission on airplanes in December, after a steady stream of news about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Ebola is not spread through the air, he learned, but other contagious diseases — including the H1N1 “swine” flu virus and SARS virus — are spread through the air.

And that’s a problem in the cramped confines of airplane cabins, where everyone is breathing everyone else’s air.

As Wang puts it: “With the traditional cabin, what’s happening is you’ve got two large, turbulent swirls happening. You’re spreading disease across the rows and longitudinally.”

Can you say that more plainly? “When someone sneezes, there’s a mess everywhere.”

Here’s Wang’s video simulation of airflow in a “traditional cabin,” i.e. the cabin that we’re all subjected to when we fly now and his simulation of airflow in a cabin modified with his device: more at link above.