Nathan founded Shared Skies Initiative, a nonprofit addressing environmental injustice in Dallas, where low-income and minority families have been disproportionately burdened with air pollution for decades. For Nathan, this work is personal: he spent years tutoring elementary students in West Dallas, has lived with respiratory illness himself, and lost family members to lung cancer. When a student asked why the air was so hazy, Nathan found that West Dallas suffers childhood asthma rates several times the state average, while a single monitor covers more than 900 square miles, leaving the neighborhoods most at risk without local air quality data.
His first instinct was adding more sensors, but they proved expensive to install and maintain, so he built a machine-learning model that accurately predicts particulate matter in places without monitors, using sensors for validation. The result is a real-time air quality map now used by 1,000 Texans that allows residents to easily monitor local pollution. Nathan’s team wrote a 50-page environmental justice primer in English and Spanish and shared it with over 60 low-income schools, reaching 30,000 students. His team has also donated 50 student-built air filters that cut indoor pollution by 95%, along with 10,000 KN95 masks and bilingual booklets, and trained 300 youth ambassadors to read data and protect their families. Shared Skies also advocates for the closure of a shingle manufacturing plant just hundreds of yards from West Dallas homes. Nathan has organized a letter-writing campaign to elected officials, spoken before local city councils, and partnered with grassroots organizations to bring youth voices to the table. “Research only makes a difference when it reaches the people it is about,” says Nathan. “A paper in a journal won't protect a child from polluted air as he walks to school, but a bilingual booklet a mother can read will.”
“Nothing is more inspiring than stories about heroic people who have truly made a difference to the world,” says T. A. Barron. “And we need our heroes today more than ever. Not celebrities, but heroes – people whose character can inspire us all. That is the purpose of the Barron Prize: to shine the spotlight on these amazing young people so that their stories will inspire others.”
For more information, visit www.barronprize.org
