Vivian Liu

Vivian Liu is a high school senior in Texas whose work centers on art as a tool for education, female mentorship, and water research.

She founded Origami For Good, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with 300+ chapters that brings hands-on learning into classrooms. Taught to fold by her grandmother, Vivian designs workshops where children build structures to learn engineering and fold endangered animals to learn conservation. Alongside the workshops, she leads 7,000+ volunteers distributing hundreds of thousands of origami pieces to hospitals, nursing homes, and senior centers.

She later built Future Female Scholars, a mentorship platform for girls in STEM offering 2,000+ free mentor contacts, started after noticing how few female mentors she had. It has recorded 10,000+ free one-on-one tutoring sessions and reached 150,000 followers on Instagram (@future.female.scholars).

Beyond the classroom, Vivian is a water researcher building sustainable inventions. In Dr. Taeyul Choi's lab, she turns DVDs, CDs, and Blu-ray discs into cheap sensors that detect toxins in drinking water, winning her a Grand Award and a Special Award at the International Science and Engineering Fair. As a Simons Summer Research Fellow in Dr. Benjamin Hsiao's lab at Stony Brook, she made biodegradable sponges that soak fertilizer runoff from rivers.