(The desire to help is such a guiding principle that she repeats the word 41 more times during our conversation.) She’d seen anxiety affect the lives of people around her-a family member, a “genius” schoolmate who’d cry and hyperventilate with each test, strangers in TikTok confessionals. Over Zoom, gesturing with hands laden with silver rings, Alqahtani recounts how she wanted to work toward something that would genuinely help people in her generation. Her prototype aims to address the problems of stigma and inaccessibility that, psychologists say, present substantial roadblocks to teens getting mental health care.Īlqahtani began researching her prizewinning project last year as a participant in Mawhiba, a national STEM program for gifted-and-talented students in Saudi Arabia. The now-18-year-old from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had laser-like focus on an extracurricular passion project: Creating a video-game tool to help diagnose teenagers with generalized anxiety disorder.Īlqahtani’s ambitious proposal-inspired, in part, by personal experience with the stressors of the pandemic-won her a behavioral science award in this year’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, an annual competition for ninth through twelfth graders administered by the Society for Science in Washington, D.C.
To manage her busy schedule, she had duplicate calendars-one on Google Calendar, the other printed and placed behind her laptop, so that even a power outage wouldn’t derail her. In addition to her STEM research, Alqahtani is a poet and artist.Īt one point last year, high schooler Rasha Alqahtani had finals coming up and 35 Zoom calls booked.
Rasha Alqahtani, an 18-year-old from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, won a third award in the behavioral and social sciences category of the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair for her prototype of a video game feature to assess anxiety.