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Shaifali Puri - Be Innovative!

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Shaifali Puri, Executive Director at Scientists without Borders gave a rather inspiring lecture last week. Ms. Puri is a graduate from Princeton and Stanford law. However, she does not use her law degree as a corporate attorney like I would have expected. Instead, she uses her natural intelligence and gift for development to find new ideas of innovation to solve some of the largest and most severe social issues in the world. She started off by explaining the basic nature of Scientists without Borders and their basic strategies in problem solving and universal influence. The company set forward to use the power of the crowd to fix large issues by getting public input and ideas about how they can tackle problems like starvation and malaria. They decided to use the power of incentives to establish this goal in which they created a website that they could use to reach out to people and people could use this website to express their ideas. The winner would receive a $10,000 award which is slightly contradictory to the point that she made at the beginning of her lecture, implying that the work that they aimed to complete avoided involving large sums of money. Depending on how it is perceived, $10,000 dollars may be change in their perspectives compared to the one million dollar incentive offered by Netflix for their project. They would offer this prize to the person or group of people who could with the best scientific idea to solve the issue of global malnutrition. Puri explained the severity of malnutrition around the world, stating that children around the world are born stunted and can die as fetuses because their mothers are malnourished. They live under two dollars a day. The most challenging part about facing this issue was figuring out a way for these people to get the nutrition they need without having to do anything out of the ordinary. Puri then went into detail about various different ideas that were presented to them, but never

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