14-Year-old Indian selected for NASA’s MSI Fellowship Virtual panel in third attempt
Mangalore Today News Network / News18
New Delhi, Aug 20, 2021: In a commendable achievement, a 14-year-old girl from Aurangabad, Maharashtra was selected as a panellist in a NASA event. Diksha Shinde, a class 10 student, was selected in NASA’s MSI Fellowship Virtual panel. According to Shinde, she read several books by Stephen Hawking and then submitted an essay titled ‘Questioning the Existence of God’ in September, However, it was rejected. She made some more changes to the initial essay and submitted it again, which then got rejected for the second time.
Talking to news agency ANI, Shinde said, “I then decided to send a research article in December 2020 on ‘Black Hole’ which was liked and accepted at NASA. I won a research competition organised by International Astronomical Search Collaboration. In that, I provisionally discovered the ‘Main Belt asteroid’.”
Shinde’s paper on ‘We Live in Black Hole?’ was accepted by the International Journal of Scientific and Engineering Research in May 2021. According to Shinde, she was selected for the MSI Fellowships Virtual panel in June. She said that her job involves reviewing proposals submitted by researchers and describing a collaborating approach for conducting research at NASA.
Maharashtra | Diksha Shinde, a 14-yr-old girl in Aurangabad, was selected as a panellist on NASA’s MSI Fellowships Virtual Panel.
— ANI (@ANI) August 19, 2021
"I wrote a theory on black holes & God. It was accepted by NASA after 3 attempts. They asked me to write articles for their website,"she said (18.08) pic.twitter.com/yxDqApWKWm
Shinde’s father, Krishna, is the headmaster at a non-aided school and her mother, Ranjana, takes tuition classes. According to the 14-year-old, she attends the research discussions every alternate day and gets paid for the job of a panellist. She told ANI, “I just got an email from NASA about selection as a panellist on MSI Fellowship panel. I was surprised to receive it. I will do my job between 1 am and 4 am on alternate days and also get a monthly honorarium for it.”
The young researcher will be attending a conference held in October 2021, with NASA bearing all the expenses.