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Shining Stars: Jora Singh Nahal, a 14-year-old grade 9 student from Vancouver, won the 2023 Young Innovator of the Year Award and $5,000 cash prize last week, at the Youth Innovation Showcase organized by the Science Fair Foundation BC, for his innovative project: A Novel Soap Recycling Embedded System for Greener Hospitality. Globally, hotels throw away millions of partially-used soap bars everyday that end up in the landfill and cause pollution, economic loss, and wastage of our precious natural resources; and currently there is no practical solution for this. Due to Jora Singh’s personal experience, as his family owns hotels before he was born, Jora Singh was inspired to solve this global problem with his passion for technology and coding. He created a novel soap recycling device that recycles wasted soaps into a soapy solution, right at source (in the hotels itself), that can be added to the hotel’s existing laundry system via tubes along with other cleaning supplies; and it has many other applications as well. Jora Singh’s brother, Jodh Singh Nahal, who is a UBC engineering Presidential Scholar student, mentored him. Both brothers have been doing regional and national-level science fairs and math competitions since a very young age and have won more than 5 dozen awards and scholarships. Other than academics, they both are multi-sport athletes and have played 5 sports for school’s sports teams. Also, both brothers (Jodh Singh and Jora Singh) play harmonium and do shabad-kirtan on Sunday mornings at Gurudwara Sahib, for the past around 8 years.